Helen Phillips on the Effects of Technology and AI on Our Most Intimate Bonds

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Helen Phillips’s new novel, Hum, takes place in a world populated by intelligent robots called “hums.” In this work of speculative fiction, Philips explores a near future stemming out of our world’s obsession with technology and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, though, this is a story about family, as May, a wife and mother, loses her job to AI and seeks out desperate measures to take care of herself and her family.

Underneath this dystopian story is one of a mother longing for connection and a family that is both close and so distant from one another all at once. I sped through this novel, drawn in by the characters as well as the sense of intrigue in this world not so different from our own. Phillips builds a sense of tension and quiet discomfort, keeping me gripped from start to finish.

Deena ElGenaidi: While this book is about a future society where AI is everywhere and everyone is under constant surveillance, the story is also very much about family, marriage, and motherhood. Why did you choose to show this dystopian future through a family story?

Helen Phillips: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m glad you pulled out the point that the setting aside, it really is about a family and about connections within a family, because I do find that to be the focal point.

I guess the reason to put that in a dystopian setting is that as we look ahead to the future at some of the things that will be wrought by technology and climate change, I feel like family is a little bit unexplored. What effect will this have on the family? What effect will this have on our most intimate bonds? That is one of the most pressing questions, certainly for someone raising children now and also for anyone trying to have close intimate relationships of any sort. So that was something I really wanted to explore. How do these technologies and changes in our world impact us at that most profound level of intimate connection?

DE: In the end notes of the book, you have a really comprehensive list of all the research you’d done and all the articles you’d read paired with specific scenes. When doing your research, did you already have an idea for the book in mind or did the idea develop out of these pieces you read? And how did the research end up informing the story and plot?

How do these technologies and changes in our world impact us at that most profound level of intimate connection?

HP: It’s such an intricate braid that it’s almost impossible to answer that question. The way I started the book was, a line would come to me, or an image or a plot idea. And then I might see a headline like “There’s been a 30% decline in the bird population in North America in the last half century.” That headline would be in my notes.

So the book began as a hundred page list of things from my own mind, overheard lines, newspaper headlines, and things that were happening in our world. I had the plot to some extent. I knew that there would be this one remaining green area that was very valued in the middle of this city. So that setting was present for me. This idea of a woman who had lost her job to artificial intelligence and needed to do something extreme to make money for her family came pretty early on. But it was also a lot of braiding those ideas together with the reading I was doing. 

I know Margaret Atwood said of The Handmaid’s Tale that nothing that happens in the book hasn’t happened in some form somewhere. That quote has always been really interesting to me as someone who writes speculative fiction. This is not set in our world, yet I did draw from a lot of things that are happening in our world as I was crafting the landscape of the story.

DE: That’s such an interesting process.

HP: It’s very slow. It’s really not efficient. There’s so much research I did that doesn’t even appear in the book whatsoever. I mean, the original draft was twice as long as the final draft. But I didn’t want it to be a didactic book, so I ended up pulling back on a lot of the stuff that I had originally put in that was more connected to the research.

DE: I want to talk about the beginning of the book. It has such an eerie start. The main character, May, is literally selling her face. I thought that was fascinating. How did you come up with that idea?

HP: There are two answers to that. One is that she loses her job to artificial intelligence, and as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and is able to do more things, I have a very real concern about what people will do to make money. She has to turn to this really extreme way of making money. 

On a much more personal note, I have the autoimmune condition alopecia, so I’m bald. I lost all of my hair at age 11 due to this condition, and when I was around 13, I made the decision with my mother that I would have eyebrows tattooed onto my face because I had lost all of my eyebrows, and a face likes eyebrows. So I had a tattoo artist put eyebrows on my face, and I think the numbing gels have come a long way since then, but it was a really intense experience of just having needles right up in my eyes. The sensory experience of that first scene is actually drawn from a procedure that I had.

DE: Oh wow, that’s so interesting. Also in this book, the characters are always being watched. They live in a surveillance state, and the hums can immediately pull up footage of what everyone is doing all the time, which eventually leads to May’s downfall. At the same time, May and the characters enable and participate in that surveillance whenever it’s convenient for them. May is tracking her family’s location. She goes into her husband’s woom to see what he’s been watching or searching. What message is this book giving about our own complicity in surveillance culture?

How do we deal with the fact that we have been complicit in our own surveillance?

HP: You’ve asked the question that is so much the heart of the book—just this gray area of technology. It’s really hard not to be a hypocrite in the system that we live in. Like I’m concerned about the impact of a company like Amazon on our world, but I do order things on Amazon when it’s some random thing that I need quickly. And I’m embarrassed to admit that, but I do, and a lot of us do. 

This question explains everything about my book. I mean, that is the question of the book. How do we deal with the fact that we have been complicit in our own surveillance in a way that is more than what the government ever could have accomplished, because of the amount of information that we share about ourselves through social media and through the Internet and through our shopping habits?

At the same time, consumers don’t have a government or corporate system that is protecting them from this surveillance, either. So I don’t blame us. We’re in a system that operates this way, and the book is intended to be an exploration of the times when we are uncomfortable with the technology that is tracking us and those times when we allow it to happen. 

DE: The hums are also so eerie and sinister. Is there anything that inspired you to come up with them, or any other speculative fiction or dystopian stories you were thinking of?

HP: It’s interesting that you describe them as eerie and sinister because I hope that they walk a little bit of a line—that they are eerie and sinister, but also kind of appealing and friendly. I think that sometimes our technologies are.

For instance, there’s an example I read in a book called Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle. In it, she talks about the term “cookies,” which is such a friendly term. From the earliest age of childhood, if someone says “Do you want to cookie?” you’re kind of primed to say yes. So these things that we encounter as we travel around the Internet are cookies, and we say yes to them, and maybe that’s partly because they have such a cute name. Technologies that are cute and charming are kind of frightening because they become more insidious.

Maybe part of what you find sinister and eerie about the hums is the fact that they are friendly. They have calm and soothing voices. They are concerned with removing friction from our lives. I think that’s part of what makes them eerie.

Technologies that are cute and charming are kind of frightening because they become more insidious.

At the same time, and I will avoid spoilers here, I do want the characters of the hum to have a little more nuance than that. There are hopefully moments where the reader can like the hum or feel fond of the hum or not only be scared of the hum but also think that the hum has something wise to offer.

I did also do a lot of research about artificial intelligence when I was writing the book, and one book that was helpful just in terms of the scope of the history of artificial intelligence is a book by Clifford A. Pickover called Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History. I also read another book called The Artist in the Machine by Arthur I. Miller, and it’s about human-AI creative collaborations and takes a much more positive view of that than I think a lot of us tend to, or at least than I tend to.

So those things are both helpful for me in thinking about what the hums looked like and in trying to develop them, almost to refer back to your last question, as existing in this gray area where they’re eerie and frightening.

DE: Yeah, for sure what you were saying about the friendliness of the hums, I think is what made them eerie for me.

HP: Yeah, that’s almost scarier than a robot that looks like a warrior. A sort of friendly, cute robot has an easier time getting into our lives in an insidious way.

DE: What would you say May represents or the family as a whole represents? Is she the template for the average American, and is this the template for the average American family?

HP: Well, I’m always concerned by the word average because we live in such a complex world that what average is, really depends on who you’re talking to. With May and her family, it was more just this question of, how does one family and one woman navigate the challenges of this world of dizzying technological advancement and climate change?

She just wants the things that I think are very common for people to want. She wants to be able to love and care for and provide for her family, and those things are becoming ever harder to do and ever more complicated to achieve. I don’t know if that makes for average or not, but I wasn’t really thinking of averages, more of one specific woman navigating a situation that a lot of people are navigating a version of.

DE: Would you say that the book can serve as a warning to our current society?

HP: I mean, is it a cautionary tale? Perhaps. Yes, I think it is in part a cautionary tale. May exists in a world that bends towards disconnection. A lot of things are conspiring towards disconnection, and she is seeking connection. She’s really trying hard, and she’s stumbling a lot. She wants to connect with her children. She wants to connect with her partner. She wants to connect with nature. She wants to connect with herself, and the world she exists in makes it really hard for her to do that. But I do think she tries hard, and I hope that there are at least glimmers of her finding ways to do that even amid her circumstances.

DE: Yeah, absolutely.

I did feel almost a responsibility to not only write the dystopian but hopefully include other elements of possible paths.

HP: You know, I think that it becomes easier to write dystopian fiction as things maybe bend more in that direction. I did feel almost a responsibility to not only write the dystopian but hopefully include other elements of possible paths.

DE: This next question is purely for my own curiosity because I couldn’t get this scene out of my head. There’s a moment when May pulls out a box of raisins, and it’s filled with insects. But then she keeps the box of raisins. Why?

HP: Oh my god, that’s so funny. Two of my best friends who read the book had the same question. What I intend with that—and this is definitely operating on a thematic level—May finds something in this packaged place that is organic, that is biological, that indicates that even in our over packaged world, biological life can survive and thrive.

She looks at these insects, and obviously it would be absolutely repugnant to find something like this, but she is sort of like, oh they’re surviving. And so she doesn’t throw them away. But maybe it’s too weird.

DE: I loved the scene, but then I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

HP: Yeah, she keeps it on the counter, and then she’s like “Don’t eat those,” but she doesn’t actually get rid of it. Maybe after the end of the book she’s going to deal with what’s in the box, but in that first moment I think she almost has a respect for all the biological life that’s thriving amid the plastic. She too wants to be able to have a biological life that’s thriving amid all of this.

7 Funny Books That Will Make You Laugh and Then Cry

Posted on by Jo Lou

Have you ever dated a comedian? At first you’re laughing and having a good time. Without realizing it, you allow yourself to let down your guard—funny people, after all, are often perceived as light and frivolous. But then the quips get a little darker, their witty observations maybe too astute, too sharp, cutting. Before you know it, you’re laughing but also crying at an anecdote about a bowl haircut in the 10th grade. You realize that the bright and shining humor is actually the beam of a lighthouse, distracting you from the churning waters below—without which they, and you, might sink or dash yourselves upon the shore. “How did I get here?” You wonder.  “And why does crying feel so good?”

Now imagine that experience, but in book form. In my debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, we begin by following the antics of “Stranger,” a rental man who is one of the most highly rated rentals on an app where clients can request someone to play roles ranging from husband to walking companion to funeral mourner. In the opening chapters, Stranger intentionally gets turned down while proposing, pretends to be a PhD student’s advisor to convince her to continue pursuing her degree, and picks up a little girl from school as her father—light, fun. But as the story progresses, the inevitable messiness of real human emotion rocks the boat. The little girl begins to realize that there’s something off about her “dad,” and Stranger has to wrangle with what sacrifices love really entails along with the legacy of loss that shaped his own life.  

I don’t know about you, but for me laughing and crying are both a form of catharsis. And honestly, in this day and age when the internet feeds me well over my daily suggested limit of rage and hopelessness, maybe you, like me, need a little release.  

Take a gander at these books that will make you laugh and then cry (though not necessarily in that order): 

Death Valley by Melissa Broder

The narrator of Broder’s novel checks herself into a Best Western searching for the answers to her impending grief about her dying father and her ill husband. In an effort to escape the doomed trappings of her own overthinking, she decides to go for a hike in the desert where she encounters a giant cactus with enough space to hide from the world inside. What happens next has to be read to be believed. With lines like “If I’m honest, I came to escape a feeling—an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, […] that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me,” it’s clear from the very first chapter that we are click click clicking up a rollercoaster of a ride that is at once self-aware, twisted, and hilarious—and none of us, not even the narrator, has any idea what we’re in for on the way down.  

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Part love-poem to Chilean poetry, part family drama, this novel—translated into English by Megan McDowell—starts with an ill fated romance between two teenagers. Carla and Gonzalo are depicted with scathing, though not unkind, wit using amazing parentheticals like “(Gonzalo never did connect his sudden passion for haikus with his premature ejaculation problem).” After a falling out, the two reunite by chance a decade later at a club, where Gonzalo proves he no longer has a premature ejaculation problem and Carla reveals she now has a six-year-old son. The rest of the novel tackles many things, but at its heart is about Gonzalo and his adoptive son, as Gonzalo learns what it means to be a step-father, a poet, a partner, a scholar, and a failure.   

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan

This novel, written in 1964, remains one of the books that has shocked me the most. After all, how could a story about a man trying to kill his disabled newborn be funny? And yet somehow it is and somehow we can almost sympathize with Bird, the main character and new father who had dreams of traveling to Africa but is now stuck with the oppressive and universal feeling of what happens when real life obligations clip your wings. Often described as semi-autobiographical (Oe himself had a developmentally challenged son), the novel is explosive, raw, and horrible, but also deeply funny as it reveals us to ourselves.  

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast 

This graphic memoir tackles a subject not often discussed yet experienced by many: the caring of one’s elderly parents. Like several books in this list one might wonder, but how can this be funny? Chast manages to tackle bedsores, retirement funds, uncontrolled bowels, miscarriage, dementia, and danishes with an unwavering gaze, intensity, and humor that holds a mirror up to the absurdity of living (and dying). Perhaps because it is true, perhaps because it is often unbearable, the only response is to laugh. The memoir unflinchingly depicts two people so full of personality and so uniquely themselves that the book is not only a recording of their last years on earth, but also a celebration of it.  

Afterparties by Anthony Vesna So

This short story collection with recurring characters is set predominantly in the Cambodian American community of Fresno, California. Each character’s unique voice serves as a different lens from which to observe the world So evokes, such that by the end we feel as though we have something of a 360 degree view, if only from the outside. The stories are raw, hilarious, and heartbreaking.  In “Superking Son Scores Again,” a badminton coach and the owner of a failing supermarket tries to relive his glory days by annihilating the top player of his own team. In “The Monks,” a young man decides to spend a week at the temple after his deadbeat father’s passing to help his father’s soul in the afterlife, but after a week of chores ends up finding release in a more unconventional way. The collection is an undeniable force that will leave you reeling with feeling.   

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal

This gem of a novel describes summers spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The vignettes center around six-year-old Sophia and her elderly grandmother as they go about their days on the small island turning forests into magical menageries, looking for grandma’s lost false teeth, cleaning up litter, loving murderous cats, and writing treatises on angleworms. Along the way their conversations touch upon life, death, God, and love. The humor is present throughout as is the deep sadness both of the recent past as Sophia’s mother has recently died, and of the future as Sophia’s grandmother gets older. And yet, there is a humor in the sadness, too, as the grandmother thinks to herself, “It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject [of death]. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.”    

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

The first book of the Patrick Melrose novels is so sharp and so slight you’re liable to cut yourself without noticing. In it we’re introduced to the affluent Melrose family: a cruel father, an alcoholic mother, and their five-year-old child who is just on the cusp of understanding how his parents will let him down. The novel jumps between their perspective and the perspective of the high society friends who will join the family for a dinner party on that fateful day. From young party girl to simpering old philosopher, somehow Aubyn manages to capture the voices of all his characters and not only poke fun at their mannerisms and hypocrisies, but does so in that rare way that still makes them feel multidimensional and therefore deserving of some sympathy (with the exception, perhaps, of Patrick’s father). Aubyn displays virtuosity of wry humor and fresh language on each page yet also makes us worry for the five-year-old Patrick and his future growing up in such a twisted family.  

Lena Valencia Blends the Fantastic and the Mundane in “Mystery Lights”

Posted on by Jo Lou

Inspired by nightmares and the work of surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection Mystery Lights seeks to explore women’s darker natures.

We meet a feminist filmmaker, who obtains strength at a pivotal moment from her fictional murderesses. In an attack on the domestic goddess trope, a young girl, recently returned from the wilderness, disrupts her whitebread family dinners by devouring chicken gizzards and emitting animal-like shrieks. Valencia takes the topic of female hunters to another level with a story about a health guru leading a group of lost souls on a cult-like experience under the guise of self-actualization and meditation. The most powerful story in the collection follows two #MeToo antagonists, both women, who prey on vulnerable women in their proximity in order to succeed professionally or romantically. In these stories, the underlying themes of deception and self-deception slither, snake-like, just beneath the surface, with teeth that gnash as tension builds, as characters snap or gain closure, each tale playing out with a subversive twist.

Lena Valencia, the managing editor of award-winning lit mag One Story, not only excels at writing with a wicked humor—she tackles these challenging topics with empathy and electrifying insight. We spoke over Zoom about subverting the female revenge plot, using lore in fiction and writing about self-deception.

Liv Albright: One of my favorite stories was “Dogs.” I found it interesting that the protagonist, Ruth, she’s a screenwriter, and she writes these films about women who are seeking revenge for things that have happened to them, and one of the messages she gets from her boss is that she doesn’t have enough of a traumatic backstory for one of her characters. So, she thinks up possible traumas—sex trafficking, child porn—to explain her character’s murderous rampage. In another one of your other stories—which I won’t name for spoiler reasons—you have a murderer, and she doesn’t have a traumatic backstory. She’s the one causing the trauma, which we find out through a flashback scene. How did you come up with this theme and how did this come to interest you?

Lena Valencia: I’ve always been into the female revenge plot, and I also think that it can be problematic as well, because usually you’re watching these women suffer some horrible indignity, and that gets complicated because in some ways it ends up fetishizing the violence or the trauma that’s happening to them. 

So, I was thinking of a character who was writing against this. I recently came across this essay in Lit Hub by the writer Emma Copley Eisenberg about the female revenge plot and there’s this great moment in it where she says, “The revenge story I want is about a woman who hasn’t been raped or beaten or killed, but who rather has been disrespected subtly and discreetly over a period of many years.” And I thought that that was what the character Ruth was going for and what the studio was objecting to. 

LA: It seemed like the character Ruth was trying to write would have a lot of reason to be angry and to maybe get violent, maybe not kill, but be violent. She has an abusive boyfriend, a boss that’s a creep. 

LV: Yeah, totally. And I think that’s what Ruth was responding to. And then in the story itself, these themes and topics that she’s circling around in her screenplay come into her life in the form of these unpredictable animals, these wild dogs that chase her through the desert, and then this driver picks her up, and he’s totally gaslighting her, telling her that the dogs were nothing to be afraid of while he’s acting in this erratic, aggressive way. 

There’s a line at the end of the story where Ruth thinks, “Nothing had happened, and for that she supposed she should be grateful.” She wasn’t physically harmed in any way, but she’s still dealing with this fear. In writing the story, I was exploring those feelings of fear and uncertainty without there being some physically violent act to precipitate them.

LA: You bring up an interesting question about how with women, there always seems to have to be an explanation for their behavior. Because guys, if they’re violent, well, that’s just men being men. Why do you think women need that kind of backstory? But in other thrillers, like The Talented Mr. Ripley and similar films, we have guys who snap, but we don’t need a backstory for them.

LV: There’s an expectation for women to be nurturers, mothers, caretakers. Roles that aren’t inherently violent, so something horrible has to happen to them in order for them to snap. And I don’t think that men are perceived in the same way. So, it seems it’s more believable that men would become violent seemingly out of the blue. 

LA: In the story, “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” you turn the tables on the topic of assault and focus on men who snap, or commit violence, specifically sexual assault. At the college campus where the protagonist lives, there’s folklore involving a mythological figure, The Trapper, that’s circulating around campus, and The Trapper actually, I think, turns out to be an acquaintance. How did you compose that juxtaposition?

LV: That was inspired by Twin Peaks. I’ve always admired how the director David Lynch overlays surrealist horror on seemingly everyday situations. So that was something that I was thinking about as I was writing this—that switch from the real to the supernatural and then back again. Lynch understands the language of nightmares and he’s been a big inspiration for my work. And I do think that these nightmarish situations are a lot easier for us as humans to understand when they’re packaged as the supernatural. Monsters are a lot easier to stomach when they’re monsters, and they’re not human beings, which is why I think this idea of this boogeyman or stranger danger exists.

I also really love the technique of using lore in fiction, creating these stories within stories. And then deciding which characters believe in it, which characters don’t, and who’s telling the story—it adds another dimension to the narrative. 

LA: It also seems like the mythology of the lore, The Trapper, inspires violence because when the group of boys are trying to catch him, they use another student as bait, and they tie her to a tree, and then she’s gone. The Trapper takes her. It almost permits them to behave in that way. In another crime-infused story, “Vermilion,” the legal system appears to permit themselves to act on appearance biases, rather than viewing every life as worthy of saving. In the story, a woman, Nancy, laments the fact that her daughter who disappeared, her case was ignored by the police. The story opens with a podcast about another disappeared girl, Max, who won police attention because she was pretty, vivacious. You describe the woman’s daughter Esme as overweight, angsty, with heavy makeup. How do you think beauty factors into deciding whose lives matter?

LV: I think Nancy believes Max’s beauty plays a role in the way her story captured the attention of the media, and she resents that her daughter Esme didn’t get the same treatment. 

When Nancy’s going through the reasons her daughter didn’t get the same attention as Max, she’s grasping at anything she can to explain the unexplainable. She never found her daughter and so long as that remains the case, I don’t think there’s anything that law enforcement or the media could have done to make her feel like it was enough, though she’d never admit that.

There’s an expectation for women to be nurturers, mothers, caretakers, so something horrible has to happen to them in order for them to snap.

Throughout the story, when confronted with her daughter’s disappearance, Nancy is telling herself, “I’m over it. I’m over it. I’m okay.” And she’s clearly not, but she hopes that if she keeps telling herself this lie, it will come true. A lot of these stories are about self-deception. And I think that self-deception is really horrible to deal with in real life. But in fiction, I find it incredibly fascinating to read about and to write about.

LA: The theme of self-deception and deception reminds me of your story “The Reclamation,” where a group of entrepreneurs attend a cultish wellness retreat. There’s Brooke, the wellness retreat leader, and she’s not living in a bus, but she’s pretending to. There’s the main character, Pat, who is ultimately is inspired by Brooke to act in a violent way. And then there’s Celeste who is all gung ho about the retreat, and she doesn’t do well in the meditation exercises and gets angry and thinks that Brooke is a phony, which is true. What inspired you to write this story?

LV: I was thinking a lot about wellness culture and I have mixed feelings about it, because I do think a lot of aspects of wellness culture can help people in many ways. I don’t think it’s necessarily all bad. I know there are all kinds of send ups of it everywhere. I wanted to write about a situation where someone was listening to the platitudes and clichés that are associated with self-help and wellness and interpreting them in the worst possible way. 

There’s a great book called Cultish by Amanda Montell. It’s about the language that’s used in actual cults themselves, but also in multi-level marketing communities and in wellness culture and gym and fitness culture. So, I was thinking about all that and the effect that kind of language has on how a person behaves. I think that certain aspects of self-help and wellness culture have become this one-size-fits-all approach to something like therapy, which is not one-size-fits-all, at all.

LA: Do you think that Brooke believes what she’s putting out? Or do you think it’s complete strategy?

LV: I think it’s probably a combination of both. I think at her heart, she’s a businesswoman, and she’s a hustler. These con artists have been around throughout our history and Brooke is another one of those. So, I don’t think she intends to harm people per se, but I don’t think she’s coming from a genuine place of wanting to help them either. I think she’s in it for her own gain.

LA: You delve into exploitation, in a different way, in “Bright Lights, Big Deal.” The protagonist, Julia, acts in her own best interest at the expense of her friendships. When she moves to New York, she founders, and she watches her friends succeed. Her best friend, Rose, there’s some jealousy there, and Julia publishes a story about her and her boss. And Rose responds with something like, “This was not your story to tell.” Can you talk a little bit about your interest in the ethics of authorship and storytelling and how that story came about?

There was a lot of inappropriate behavior that was permitted back then and we were supposed to act like, ‘Oh, that’s just part of life.’

LV: I think it would be different if Julia had fictionalized that story that Rose told her about this creepy experience that she had with her boss. I do think that that would be a slightly more ethically gray area. But her reporting something traumatic that had happened to her friend without her permission, and also using that for clout, I think that’s very unethical. We talked a little bit about self-deception, and I think this is another story where the character, she’s definitely duped herself into thinking she’s a crusader for justice.

LA: I think self-deception is particularly evident in one scene where Rose tries to apologize and make things right. And then Julia’s thought process is that Rose is ungrateful, and Julia shouldn’t spend time dealing with her. Apparently, Julia and her family had Rose over for Christmas and meals. So, she’s twisting the narrative a bit.

LV: There’s this class situation at play. Julia doesn’t have a whole lot to lose because she’s coming from this very privileged place where if she doesn’t make it in New York, she has a very comfortable upper-middle-class suburban home to go back to, and that’s not the case with Rose. 

LA: Julia doesn’t seem to recognize her privilege. She acknowledges she has an emergency credit card, but part of what helped her rationalize sending out that article was because she thought about how Rose had it so easy, she’s able to go off with bartenders, and she just has a way with people, with men, that I think Julia doesn’t have. And Julia’s envious of that, and she doesn’t recognize that maybe these are things Rose had to learn because she didn’t have the privilege to fall back on.

LV: I think that’s a great reading of the story. Absolutely. I think the story is also about the ugliness that this misogynistic culture creates in these relationships to the point where Julia is jealous of the fact that Rose had this awful, icky, creepy experience with her kind of hot boss, and well, Julia just had some creepy experience with this ugly older man during a job interview. So, it gets into some pretty dark places there. 

It was interesting to look back and write this historical fiction that was set in the relatively recent past of 2009. I think someone in my writing group called it “PreToo,” as in pre-MeToo. There was a lot of inappropriate behavior that was permitted back then and we were supposed to act like, “Oh, that’s just part of life. That horrible, sexist behavior is just something we should come to expect in the workplace.” I think there’s obviously a lot of work to be done, but there’s also a lot that has changed since then. 

LA: When Julia offers the writer the story of Rose and her boss, the response is something to the effect of, “Well, this isn’t news. This happens all the time.” You also explore this theme, and the dynamics of class, privilege, and men using women to their advantage in “The White Place.” We have these two women, Sandra and the painter, with differing amounts of agency. Both are sexually involved with Mike, the painter’s handyman. The painter, even though she is renowned and rich, still seems to be controlled by Mike’s flattery. Sandra, on the other hand, as the daughter of the painter’s cook, isn’t in a position of privilege, has little self-confidence, and both factors cause her to believe she has no agency. What was your thinking behind creating this dynamic between the two women and their relationship with Mike?

LV: I do think that in many ways the painter is a reflection of the world that she lives in, which is a world that’s not kind to women. And I imagine her as someone who’s built a shell around herself in order to survive in the competitive art world, so that’s not necessarily going to lead to someone being a generous person. She’s really just out for herself.

And in thinking about the power dynamic, Mike and the painter, they both ascribe a large amount of power to Sandra, but she’s just a teenager. She’s just a kid and is trying to assert whatever agency she has in these moments, like when she gets cash from Mike for an abortion and gives it back to him. And then at the end, she’s finally backed into a corner, and she’s given this chance to leap into the unknown and takes it because she feels like it’s better than whatever she’s being given in her life in reality.

LA: Sandra’s knowledge of the abortion process is limited. Like a lot of young women, she’s scared, she’s heard horror stories about bleeding to death. How do you think her experience reflects a lot of other girls who may not have all the information?

Monsters are easier to stomach when they’re not human beings, which is why this idea of the boogeyman or stranger danger exists.

LV: The story was set intentionally pre-Roe and so the only information I imagined that she would’ve had would be probably from other women in her life. And also for most women who had abortions, there would’ve been a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. I think we have much more information accessible to us now, and there’s been a lot of work done by activists to destigmatize abortions. But the stigma definitely still exists, which was something that I was thinking about as I was writing the story, even though it’s set in the ‘70s. As to access to the actual procedure today, we are very much backsliding as a country, which is terrifying and upsetting.

LA: As the story wraps up, Sandra tells the painter she will attend boarding school, but at the very end, a curious thing happens—a mystical, luminous orb appears outside Sandra’s window and she walks into the brightness, “granting her own wish.” What does this mysticism signify in terms of Sandra’s capacity for developing an agency, and choosing or not choosing to get an abortion?

LV: Sandra wants more than anything to escape her situation. And the orb—this totally mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon—is a chance for her to do just that. Throughout the story, she imagines what her future will look like based on the various options she’s been dealt—futures that, to her, seem pretty bleak. In the end, stepping into the orb is the only option where she can’t envision an outcome, and for this reason she chooses it. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether the ending is hopeful, tragic, or maybe a bit of both. 

Your Voice Is My Tether to Myself

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“A to Z” by Lucie Shelly

“A to Z” was written to be enjoyed as an audio story, and we encourage you to listen, if possible. For accessibility, the full transcript is also available below. You can read it by clicking the arrow.

Alanna: So, as I was listening to your message, I dropped a charm with no chain into—you know how every girl has that big bag of shit where every pocket is full of random ass stuff? Well, it fell into that bag. So, I’m rooting through, listening to you, and then, right as you said you got your orgasm back, I found the charm!

Anyway . . . . 

Glad you got your girl back. Bummer when she goes. Did you use porn? Not ideal or pretty. Sometimes it helps. I feel like you told me that before, about needing to picture someone you didn’t actually desire to get off—it was Professor Gibbons! Throwback. That strange little music man. But you know, you genuinely loved whenever he said “modulate.” I will never forget the look on your face when he told us that in Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” there’s a “truck driver modulation.” Anyway, I wonder—maybe there’s a part of you that’s anxious about being really vulnerable—the way we are when we’re having sex or orgasming—with people that you are attracted to. So instead—even on your own—you’re more comfortable being vulnerable with the idea of someone you don’t care about. Yep, that’s my know-nothing, psychology school of Alanna opinion.

Pandemic life in New York is . . . yeah, exactly that. I feel bad complaining because it’s nowhere near as strict as Ireland. Which is probably why the death rate here is crazy high. But, if we had Ireland’s level of restrictions, I probably would have killed Phil by now. I’m kind of picking fights with him, and then, just being in a bad mood. It’s weird, he’ll be like, Are you happy? You just seem really unhappy. And I’m so quick to be like, no, no I’m totally happy, even if it’s not fully true. Not because of him or our relationship . . . I think I’ve just been extra moody lately. This week it really has come in waves. Sounds like you’re kind of struggling with that as well. 

Anyway, my love. I’ll stop complaining. But I hope you’re sleeping well on the other side of the pond.

Zoe: Hello, from the other side! God, I know you love Adele, but jaysus I can’t stand her. 

I’m sorry to hear about the frustrations with Phil. Go easy on yourself though please, everyone is struggling right now. I wonder how much of my funk is hormonal. I don’t like to attribute too much to hormones because then I feel like I’m just their subject, like one of those weird deep sea creatures, siphonophores, don’t really know how you say that word, but they’re these creatures like jellyfish that are really organism colonies. In this case, the hormones are the creature and I am the drifting, gas-filled sack. Anyway I’ve just woken up. And it’s still lockdown. And I’m still alone in my house. Maybe today I’ll get some words on the page. 

Yesterday evening, my lockdown brain snagged on this thought: What if the great heartbreak of my life is that I’m never heartbroken? Like, I never love someone enough to feel that. The great relationship of my twenties or even that huge, first teenage love. That didn’t happen for me. I think the closest thing I’ve felt to big love was with Paul, but we never got a real shot. It’s hard when you’re friends. We had all these . . . big professions of feelings, you know, but there was always something—one of us was going traveling, he had a girlfriend. And for a while there, I was really interested in radical self-sufficiency. I don’t know, I was reading a lot of Rebecca Solnit. Oh well. Did I ever stop needing my friends? Needing you? And how can I know I’ve chosen whole independence if I’ve never properly lived the alternative?

I won’t say it’s a question of what’s wrong with me, but I do wonder what’s different about me that’s led to this difference? All I can conclude is a fear—a guardedness. That vulnerability inability that you nailed so quickly. For me, so subconscious I’m not even aware of it. But an ocean away, and you can see me better than I can. 

I never thought of myself as a person who is afraid. But maybe I am afraid of men, in a way. Did you ever see me like that?

And how do I confront a fear if I can’t articulate its reason?

Zoe: PS—Thank you for weathering my monologuing. When I talk about feeling lonely, I feel so narcissistic. I don’t know if we have a neutral way to talk about loneliness? You mention it and it’s as if people are afraid they’ll catch it, like it’s more contagious than feckin’ COVID! It’s mad looking at the US—it’s like they don’t think people can die from this thing!

Sorry, last thing, but, do you know there are people out there who consider it a conspiracy that Taylor Swift might be gay? Or bi? Whatever. The group who thinks she is gay call themselves Gaylors, and do you know what the anti-conspiracist conspirators call themselves? Hetlors. Like Hitler but hetero. 

Alanna: Oh my god, I cackled at the Gaylors thing. I mean, I assume Taylor is . . . whatever sexual, and my Jewish ass is certainly never going to be with the Hetlors. 

And I don’t think your messages are narcissistic. They are—they’re answers to the perennial question: What are you going through? So, I love hearing your monologues, as you call them, and I always want to hear them. [LAUGHS]

To your fear question, I never perceived you as being, like, afraid to be in a relationship. Maybe you’ve been hesitant because you lead a very independent life and you enjoy things like reading and writing, which require isolation and being alone for stretches of time. Like, you’ve said you want a meaningful relationship but I guess you’ve never pursued it heavily. I’ve put a lot of effort into it. Like even in periods when I shouldn’t have been putting any effort into it. I think that’s the only reason relationships have been a bigger part of my life. Weirdly, though, I think I am afraid of men. There are very few people who I’ve crossed a certain level of intimacy with. Sexual intimacy I can usually do pretty well. It’s the truly opening up on all the levels. 

Anyway, I’m running out the door so I have to go, but I’ll talk to you soon! Love you!

Alanna: Oh, really quickly. I was thinking yesterday, I wish we could be, like, solitude camels? You know, like store up all the contentment of doing your thing in your alone time and then when your life is crazed by whatever, you could just draw a little of that feeling out. Maybe I wish we could do that with lots of emotions. Joy, happiness. But isn’t that what I get from talking to you?

The solitude one feels different, though. Because even though I’d like to bottle it, in a lockdown situation, solitude is scary. Anyway, just a dumb thought. Talk to you soon!

Zoe: Hallo! So, I’m off to the café for a takeaway coffee, the fucking social highlight of my days. The baristas here are my new best pals. They’re so much cooler than I was in my twenties. I was listening to them chatting the other day and one girl says, Wait, you are queer, aren’t you? And the other was like, Yeah. It struck me because . . . it was so casual, in a small city in the west of Catholic Ireland, it was totally expected. And, well, there are these looks sometimes between me and one of the baristas and I know if she was a man I’d think it was a “moment.” 

It’s probably the time we’re in. She’s making more of an effort to connect with customers from behind a mask and I’m just that fucking lonely. I just read this great essay by Elif Batuman—she wrote The Idiot, which I loved, which was a very autobiographical novel about a loooong fruitless crush on a guy. But the essay was about finding love later in life—she’s in her forties now, and with a woman. She talks about how she’d been asking herself questions for years about the discomfort she felt when she was trying to love or be with men—even the kinds of noises she made during sex. And when she started dating a woman, all that “normal” behaviour felt fake and weird and unnecessary. A story like that makes me wonder about myself. But I feel I would know. And yes, conditioning, learned expressions of the “right” feelings. But, for instance—and no offence—I’ve never wanted to sleep with you and we’re as close as can be. Like, what if this is like saying, I’m so single and lonely, I must be gay. That’s fucked. I know it’s a spectrum, so I guess we’re all on it, but. I don’t know.

Anyway. Oh, I meant to say. Thanks for reassuring me about the fear thing the other day. And it’s interesting—I never would have perceived that you have trouble opening up on deeper levels. Or feel that you do.

Alanna: Hey. Oh wait. Oh shit. Sorry, hold on.

I am so sorry, my phone was connected to my headphones and the mic on those sucks. Anyway. Uh, no offence taken about never wanting to sleep with me. The feeling is mutual. But I also don’t think I’m your litmus test for your sexuality. I’m just one person, girl, so I’m very curious about these “moments” you’re having with the girl at the café. You know, I’ve had a number of really close female friendships that were short-lived but intense and I had this, like, reverence for them. Now I look back and I’m like, oh, maybe that was a crush. Actually, now that I’m saying this out loud, there’s this one girl from that kayaking trip I took the year after I had cancer. I was immediately drawn to her and immediately thought, oh, if I was into girls, I’d be into this girl. I saw her last time I was in LA. I thought, she’s really pretty and we just have this fun vibe, it feels like flirting. Maybe it is, I don’t know, but we rarely get to see each other, and she has a fiancé so it’s not a thing. But it was nice to get these slight butterflies that were—I don’t know, when was the last time I got butterflies around a guy? But I think I’m very comfortable flirting with men because that’s what I’m used to.

Um, have you watched “I May Destroy You?” It’s amazing. Fucking obsessed with Michaela Cole. It’s about assault, and men, and sex, but really, it’s about everything. Me and Phil watched like four episodes last night. Unfortunately, we also got into a huge argument afterwards. I don’t know, I was just kind of . . . off after the content of the show and when he said why, I said I was just really moved by the show and then he got all quiet and was obviously annoyed, so I was like, are you okay? And he was like, how could you ever think I would do something like that to you? And I said, I don’t think you’d ever try to hurt me, it’s just a thought-provoking show. And then of course it devolves into yelling. Except, normally I keep my cool, but this time I was the one yelling, yelling, this is fucking dumb. After a while he goes, why are you even with me? And I always hate it when he says that because I think it shows low self-esteem on his end . . . and because I’m not fully confident in my answer to that question. Which I know is a problem. Plus, he’s picking up on it. But I just want to be like, please don’t do this. And it will be fine. So, we are fine now, but it was a whole thing.

Zoe: So, if I sound like I’m rushing, I am because, even though I had loads of time this morning, I am running late to work. Not that anyone will know. I’m late to package a bunch of online orders alone in a shop for minimum wage.

Em, “I May Destroy You” sounds brilliant, I’ll have to watch. I never understand why guys don’t internalize those stories more. Like do they never feel afraid watching them? Not fearful like a woman, but afraid of what can be inside even quote unquote good men? And I’m sorry you became the screaming person—which, I only mean I know you’ll be hard on yourself. Don’t be. If I were you, I’d be at my limit. So, I . . . I’m glad the two of you are fine.

D’ya know what—it’s actually possible I induced this rush, because it feels good, or like life, to be rushing.

Oh! Guess who I ran into on my walk the other day? Paul. I’d seen on social he was back in Ireland but I hadn’t reached out. We ended up chatting for ages, just sitting by the canal with our coffees! He told me he’d had a mental breakdown on a Monday and he was back in Ireland on a Thursday. And right before everything locked down—lucky. He’s in therapy and considering SSRIs—they don’t prescribe as easily here. But as candid as he was, he didn’t mention his relationship, or rather, the breakup that I guess happened. I didn’t push it but—

As you know, in the past, there’s always been this charge between us. This time, things felt mellow but there was a lot of recognition and, I don’t know, a gentleness that was palpable. The problem for me is, he’s the ultimate meeting point of fantasy and reality. Since college, one of us has always had feelings when it’s not right for the other—he’s professed, I’ve professed—but regardless, we’ve never dated, so everything we’ve felt has been both imagined and confirmed. 

I was so proud of myself for not pining—I’d shed the old feelings. I was expecting to hear he was engaged and be happy for him. So this is like . . . I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Maybe it’s the strange pause the world is in, but this feels like an opening. A chance. Our chance.

I feel very calm. Even when I was with him. At the same time, he’s back in my head like a little kernel, and my head is like, what if what if what if. 

God. Me talking to you about Paul confusion. This is feeling 22.

Zoe: Sorry, one more thing. I just read House of Mirth. A classic I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. Alanna, read it. It’s not happy, but. It’s tragic without being apologetic or moralising. It’s about a young woman who won’t settle and it’s about longing and it’s about perceptions of culture and it’s about money—which we don’t talk about enough. It’s insane how relevant it all still is.

Alanna: Hello, Zo. So nice to listen to your sweet voice. And I can listen to it whenever I want. And I love that I can hear seagulls in the background and imagine I’m in Galway with you. 

I just got in, it’s so hot, I’m exhausted and just lying on the couch unable to move. But I can move my mouth. [LAUGHS] It’s funny, a year ago if I was tired like this I would have been so afraid the cancer was coming back. Today, I’m like, no it’s just 90 fucking degrees in New York City. That’s growth, right?

Um, that’s very exciting to hear about Paul. We haven’t stayed in touch. Honestly, we were never close. That drunken make out was a total accident that I still feel bad about. You were our connection. Interesting about his breakdown. Um, how do you feel about that? Wait, do you know he’s had a breakup? Cause it’s a bit of a red flag to me that he didn’t mention it at all. But I don’t mean to be a downer. I love that this . . . this could be it. You guys might finally get your shot. 

Break down. Breakup. I guess breakups are the uplifting breakages?

I love listening to your messages. They make me happy.

So I have this medical bill for an oestradiol test that I really don’t want to pay for because I don’t think I should have to, but the thought of putting in the effort to get my insurance to cover it is so daunting. I know you probably don’t have this problem in Ireland, which makes me really jealous. Like, the test is only covered if you got it because you previously had low oestradiol. But how would you know if you have low oestradiol unless you have the test?

Um, what else, what else? I got into this big fight with Phil last night over the stupidest thing. We’re waiting for “Lovecraft” to become available, so we put on this cooking show where Selena Gomez makes a dish with some celebrity chef and Phil starts ripping into Selena Gomez, like, why did they choose her for this, blah blah blah, and I was like, why does he have such strong opinions about Selena fucking Gomez? Who cares? So I said, maybe we can be a little bit less negative tonight. 

And then he shuts down, and I can tell he’s annoyed, and finally I’m like, what’s wrong? And he just gets going, he’s like, you want to change me, and I just kind of said, do we really need to have an argument about this? But it becomes this huge thing about ex-girlfriends and co-workers who said he had too many opinions or he was too negative. I kinda said, all these people from all your different walks of life have told you this, has it not occurred to you that maybe there’s some truth to it? And he’s like, I would expect you to see me for who I really am.

Which I get, but, I ended up saying, if you show me something, you can’t get mad that I’m not seeing something other than the thing you’re showing me. I think I said it like that. And he was just like, I’m gonna go. And he left. But on the way out he—we’ve never said “I love you,” which I always thought was kind of telling because, eight months. But he goes, I fucking love you and it’s maddening. And he just walks out. 

Saying it like that. I don’t know if the word is . . . manipulative? I guess I appreciate him telling me the extent of his feelings . . . . 

“A-pree-SEE-ate.” I get that from you. 

We’re supposed to go to the mountains for a few days the week after next and honestly I don’t know if we’ll make it. If we’d been dating during normal times, I’m not sure I would have stayed in this thing.

I’m sorry I’ve been talking for so long and done a woefully inadequate job responding to anything in your message. But I love you and talk to you soon.

Zoe: Good morning, Alannalove! Love to wake up to your voice. 

But I am so sorry about fucking Phil. When you were wondering what the word was, I was thinking, manipulative, manipulative, and then you said “manipulative.” That he would say I love you for the first time in . . . anger. Using that like some sort of trump card. A terrible, “gotcha.” Is that even really saying, I love you? I don’t know, I’m so sorry.

The other day, I was reading about dialects for this other thing, and naturally ended up down a linguistics rabbit hole. But apparently, any language that comes from the proto or “mother” language is called a daughter language, and the related daughters are called “sisters.” Very appropriate that the terms are feminine.

But anyway, there are tons of dialectical breakdowns based on inflection, accent, vocabulary, and phrasing blends and stuff. I was thinking, maybe on a micro, micro, micro level, based on your individual experiences and the people you encounter, the phrases and inflections you assimilate, maybe everyone is technically speaking their own dialect. Like, you and Phil could literally be speaking a different dialect, and I guess a relationship should build a dialect. Not sure that’s really going to make you feel better. Sorry. If nothing else, maybe some arguing is necessary emotional stimulation? Like, a resistance that forces us to interrogate our feelings? I feel like, we look for creative or intellectual stimulation from our partners. Maybe arguing is part of how we get the emotional? Although, in other relationships, with you, I never feel the need to fight to dissect something . . . . 

Ooh—can you hear your seagulls? My window is open. Since lockdown they are feral. Ballistic, attacking all the trash! Don’t know if I told you, but I went rollerblading in a car park that closed during lockdown. I was up on the top deck, it’s open air, and when I got up there, it was covered in seagull shit. It was like, you know in “The Lion King” when the cubs go into the hyena den and it’s full of the detritus of hyena depravity—it was like that. There were bones and feathers and big bird shits and it was like I’d found the seagull lair up high in this airy space with a beautiful harbour view. They’d taken over like, and I could tell—as you would say—they were pissed that I was trespassing. There was this one guy who just stood there and gave me that [LAUGHING] bird side-eye, which I guess birds are always giving you because their eyes are on the side of their head. Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know why I find that so funny. [COUGHING] Jaysus, might need a COVID test. Or this is just the manic laughter of someone who spends too much time alone. 

Less time recently, though! I’ve been seeing a good bit of Paul. Funny you mention a trip —I was thinking of suggesting we do one. It probably seems a little out there but we’ve known each other for so long, and they’ve finally lifted the 5K restriction, and COVID changes the dating norms. If that’s what we’re doing. I don’t even know. I would’ve told you if we’d kissed, we haven’t. I think we know what we feel, could feel, for each other. But it’s growing from such an old feeling that it’s taking time to find new form. I feel like being in a neutral place might help. This town has too many memories from college days. And nights. Nights we’re all happy to forget.

I better get up. I had one of those scary wakings. Do you remember, in college, I used to wake gasping, like I was waking because I’d stopped breathing. I thought it was sleep apnea but it seemed to go away, then, so I never did anything about it. Hasn’t happened in ages. 

But seriously, fuck Phil. I love you and it’s glorious.

Alanna: Okay, wow, I had no memory of the dance scene in “A Knight’s Tale” until you sent me that clip, but you’re right, Heath is unbelievably captivating and charismatic and it will never not be heartbreaking what happened to him.

And as a dance scene, that one has all the goods—how do all these people, medieval people, know the same fake dance to David Bowie’s “Golden Years”? Amazing. It sent me down this rabbit hole of great, unexpected dance scenes in movies. They might be my favourite kind of scene. Like, “Ex Machina”? Or “Beetlejuice”? Honestly, if I was a writer, I’d put a dance scene in every piece I wrote, like a little signature. You can take that hot tip. I expect to see my name in your acknowledgements. 

Um, I also went down the rabbit hole of dance movies in general. Oh my god, “Center Stage”? Cooper Nielsen? Best fake name ever. I remember you hated “The Last Dance” because it is bad dancing and completely unrealistic, but I love it. And I was cackling remembering your impression of Julia Stiles in her audition in Save the Last Dance. Her mean-mugging is truly preposterous. And yes, it’s another bad movie about breakdancing by white people. 

She’s great in “10 Things I Hate About You,” though. Another Heath movie. That movie is probably the best of like, contemporary movies based on classic literature—isn’t it Taming of the Shrew? I mean, “Bridget Jones” and “Pride and Predj,” they’re up there, but. 

Anyway, plenty of time to watch all these since I did the thing! I haven’t heard from Phil since I called you. I guess I thought I would, but whatever. Thanks again for talking me down that night. It must have been, what, 3 a.m. in Ireland? You’re a saint. 

Unrelated, I’m reading this great book, Lost Children Archive. It’s a novel by Valeria Luiselli who I remember you talking about when we were in Mexico. I think you’d like this, if you haven’t read it already. It talks a lot about how, with archiving, you’re making a version of the experience that is a sequence of the interruptions—the photos, the recordings, the notes. You recreate the moment by saving the things that took you out of it. I just read this one line that’s hitting a little too close to COVID life. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah: “And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.” Oof, right? 

Alright my Zig-Zag-Zo. Oh! I loved your sign off the other day! That should be our new thing. I love you and it’s . . . enlivening! Is that a word? Who cares. You’ll know what I mean.

Alanna: Oh also, let me know if you and Paul are making your getaway, please! AlrightIloveyougoodbye.

Zoe: M’Lady Lanna! How did you forget your own favorite movie, “She’s the Man,” and that it’s based on Twelfth Night? That must be your winner for retellings!

[COUGHING]

Sorry. I have to be honest, I haven’t heard you sounding so lively in . . . ages! 

[COUGHING]

God, I swear I took three tests and negative. Good thing, too, because I’m delighted to report Paul and I are taking off this weekend! To Ballykineely for two nights. An Airbnb and some surfing. Very chill. And needed. I finally asked directly, but he still hasn’t talked about the breakup yet. He managed this kind of verbal sleight-of-hand where suddenly we weren’t talking about her anymore. [COUGH] I am en route to the shop, the gro sto as you would say, for your favorite thing: road snacks. 

God, it’s strange seeing so many people out. The restrictions are up, I guess life is really coming back. I’m walking down the street and talking to my phone in a way that doesn’t quite look like I’m on a phone call so I’m feeling a bit self-conscious so I’ll jump off, but I want to tell you the sweetest thing my sister said the other day. We were griping about singledom and she said, Sometimes I think we’re lucky. We still have the chance to meet someone who makes us really happy. We still have falling in love ahead of us. I almost cried. 

Soooooo, I love you and it’s . . . serenity!

Alanna: Zoooo. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you but I’m DYING to hear how the trip went! Don’t keep me in the dark. 

I’m pleased to find that I’m still feeling good! I know it’s only been, what, 10 days? And I did start Lexapro, but I doubt that’s already kicking in. Did I tell you about that by the way? Yeah, Rachel and Hannah are on it, too, and they love it. 

I am on my way to, yes, the gro sto. I’m going to make collards tonight. I also need to get—you know what, I was just about to tell you and I realized who in their right mind cares about someone else’s grocery list? Probably no one.

I’ve kinda been thinking about that, though, this idea of shared banality versus intimacy. It feels related to that thing you said about arguing and emotional stimulation—I think arguing can be mistaken for passion. I really don’t want to believe that whole thing of being drawn to what we know from childhood even if it comes from a totally uncomfortable situation. But growing up there was a lot of shouting between my mom and her boyfriends and my relationships have all featured like, big arguing. I hate to think relationships are just inherited convictions.

Oh god! Thank you, by the way, for reminding me of my own favorite movie. Or one of them—I found out last night I am still a sucker for “When Harry Met Sally.” That line: “When you meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” I bawled. 

Anyway. I love you and it’s . . . illuminating! Update me please!

Alanna: Hey, again, sorry, but while I was in the grocery store, I heard these two women talking—I couldn’t quite figure out their relationship, it didn’t seem mother-daughter, but there was an age difference. The younger one was breastfeeding and the older one was saying how everybody needs at least one person that they know really loves them unconditionally, and that’s their tether to the world. I thought that was a good way to put it because, never mind hard moments, I can be standing in a beautiful moment or somewhere spectacular, and it’s like my mind detaches me from the world or somehow diffuses me into it . . . into the ether. Not in a good way. But with a tether, if a tether is tied to you, you’re something solid that can be pulled back.

And lately, bizarrely, I’ve been so worried by the idea of my mom dying—she’s in perfectly good health. So I’m thinking maybe part of my worry is that I don’t have, you know, a spouse, I don’t have children. And I love my sister, but . . . she has Ted, the girls . . . .

So, I guess I’m saying that outside of my mom, I feel like you’re my tether. And I hope you feel that way, too, but even if you don’t, thank you for being mine. 

Yeah, so, I hope you’re having fun with Paul, and talk to you soon.

Alanna: Just to say, in case what I said before left you feeling an immense amount of pressure, um, yeah, Hannah is also like a tether-style friend too. Um, but, just, yeah. I realize that’s probably a lot for me to say to you, so. Anyway, still dying to hear about the trip. I hope it all went well. And, I will talk to you soon. Okay, love you, bye!

Alanna: Hi. Hey. This is so fucked up and stupid, I know. I don’t know when they deactivate your number. Like how . . . I have no idea how any of that works. Fuck, this is weird, this is weird.

Alanna: I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t want to pretend I’m talking to you, Zoe. Acting like a crazy person who thinks they’ll get something back. The dumb thing is, if you were there, you’d help me figure out the fucked-up reason I’m doing this, but if you were there, I wouldn’t be sending this message at all. 

I don’t know if I miss you yet. You weren’t there when I left a bunch of dumb messages about a bunch of stupid shit but I didn’t know that. And now I’m just leaving you another dumb message, so do I suddenly miss you? Just knowing?

I love you. I love you so much. I love you and it’s . . . in a way that I will never be able to say. I tried to. But I know it’s exactly the way you love me. Loved. The way you loved me. The way I loved you.

7 Novels From the Perspectives of Multiple Women

Posted on by Jo Lou

Novels with multiple points of view aren’t telling one story, but many. They appreciate an important life principle: anybody can be a hero given the right opportunity. Even when focused on  the same event, each recollection is different, tinted by each person’s experience and knowledge. These perspectives might corroborate or contradict, add another dimension, form a more complete story, or even alter the meaning of an event. There’s a delicious thrill in deciding who’s telling the real version—or if such a version exists at all.

When I started working on my Shakespeare-inspired mystery Hollow Bones, I wanted to tell Isabella’s story in a contemporary setting, but after finishing that draft, it felt incomplete. It took me months to finally realize that this wasn’t just Isabella’s story. This was a tale of three women and how their lives are changed by one fire.  

These seven novels below all feature multiple women with their own versions of events. They cover a wide range of genres, from historical fiction to psychological suspense. One might even be called prose poetry. They are all generous, though, in the way they elevate their characters, including the quiet ones who might be easily forgotten in real life. In these books, each thread adds an important element to the page, complicating what we think we know, to eventually become a tapestry that holds the entire story together. 

The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister

In 1845, explorer Sir John Franklin attempted to chart the Northwest Passage, but he and his ship were lost. In response, his wife Lady Jane Franklin funded several expeditions in hopes of bringing her husband home. In Macallister’s vivid imagination, one of those expeditions is composed of twelve exceptional women. Unfortunately, they don’t all return, and their leader Virginia Reeve is put on trial for murder. What happened out there on the ice? All twelve women share parts of the story, which creates both an entertaining and moving account of their tragic adventure.  

The Bennet Women by Eden Appiah-Kubi 

I appreciate retellings that go beyond the source material, probing new questions and exploring new possibilities. Appiah-Kubi does this well, offering sharp cultural insights with a light touch. In The Bennet Women, we meet EJ, a residential advisor for an all-girls dorm, although residents are fined a quarter if they call themselves “girls” instead of “women.” Her chapters alternate with (mostly) ones from Jamie, a transgender woman who’s transitioned and ready to indulge in some normal activities like shopping with her mom and dating somebody cute. She gets her wish in both regards, but of course, this wouldn’t be a retelling of Pride and Prejudice without some obstacles to those happily ever afters.  

The Secret Place by Tana French

This is the fifth book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, and it almost seems as if French was challenging herself to do something different. Rather than a single detective’s perspective on events, this book has dual timelines, one the current police investigation and the other a year in the past. That year follows four friends at a posh boarding school. Their seemingly unshakeable bond is challenged when a boy at a nearby school is murdered. The book has all the elements of a straight-forward mystery: crime, investigation, and solution. But it deliberately goes beyond the case to offer a nuanced look at growing up. What changes us as we hurtle toward adulthood? 

Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

This novel, composed of short vignettes, also uses dual timelines: one in the real world and one in a girl’s dream world. In Madeleine’s mind, she joins a circus, travels to Paris, and falls in love with a man given to excessive flatulence. Back in reality, Madeleine’s mother is at first pleased by the good luck that seems to accompany her daughter’s comatose state. Eventually, though, she mistreats her unconscious charge the way she mistreated her when awake. This book is bewildering, bewitching, and quietly devastating, especially as the two worlds start to overlap. If you like strange, dark, lyric tall tales, this one’s for you.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

According to the Goodreads reviews, I’m not the first reader to be surprised by the actual erotica in this book despite the obvious title clue. Nikki, a daughter of Indian immigrants, signs up to teach English at a Sikh temple in London, but her students, a group of Punjabi widows, do not care for the course materials aimed at children. Instead, they start to write their own racy works, which are woven into the narrative. While perhaps not a traditional multiple POV novel, the women’s stories add a unique touch to an already impressive genre-bending book.

True Biz by Sara Novíc

The title of this novel refers to a slang phrase in American Sign Language popular amongst the teens at River Valley School for the Deaf. It means “seriously” and can be delivered in a range of tones from sarcastic to, well, serious. It’s a perfect title for a story that has the same range, encompassing both teenage crushes and destructive anarchy. While the novel has more than two perspectives, the ones I remember the most are Charlie, the new girl at school who struggles to fit in for a number of reasons, and the school’s headmistress February. Charlie’s eager to learn better ASL and make friends while February’s determined to keep the school funded and her students out of trouble. Neither character has an easy path, but Novíc has such a light, believable writing style that even the violence feels inevitable rather than tragic.

Kismet by Amina Akhtar

Akhtar is one of the most original voices in crime fiction writing today. I love that you can open one of her books and have absolutely no clue what’s going to happen. While reading her debut #fashionvictim, I found myself rooting for a serial killer. With Kismet, I was wholly #teamravens.  Yes, the ravens get their own chapters, carefully keeping track of who treats them with kindness and who treats them with disdain. In the book, Ronnie Khan relocates to Sedona hoping to reinvent herself, but she soon learns that might be more dangerous than she anticipated. The novel flits between perspectives, favoring Ronnie’s voice but sometimes offering a bird’s-eye view from the killer and other times a bird’s-eye-view from, well, the birds. 

7 Thrilling Tales That Upturn What We Know about Black History 

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When most folks hear the word “archive,” they picture a dusty library folder…but when scholars use the word, sometimes they mean it in a different sense. For them, “the Black Archive” certainly refers to the papers and documents that track lives and deeds. But scholars, or at least new generations of scholars and writers, also see it as something messier and more imaginary. You don’t necessarily go to a library and pull up a call number for a file with this kind of archive. Instead, you ask impossible questions: How do we remember, much less reckon with, ugly truths that entire civilizations tried to bury? How do we find stories that aren’t in census data or the letters of rich folks? Where is the archive of the diminished, the despised, the dispossessed?

Fortunately, we live in a marvelous time for solving historical mysteries. Thanks to tireless digging and creative approaches (often using digital tools such as the new databases of scanned newspapers but also using the words of poets when historians alone reach for facts and language), we have a cluster of books that model new ways to see not just Black history but also American history, with all of its beauty and cruelty, afresh.

The Black Archive is having a moment now, and here are 7 books to intrigue, confound and enlighten you—all with stunning stories of courage and love.

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Gregg Hecimovich (with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) 

Some two decades ago, The Bondswoman’s Narrative became one of the remarkable and strange best sellers of the 21st century. Written by Hannah Crafts in the 1850s, this handwritten manuscript was identified by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as the first known novel written by an African American woman. With its strange gothic horror melded with suspense, and sometimes sentimentalized and sometimes brutally matter-of-fact depictions of the pain, sexual violence, and resilience its heroine used to reveal her captors’ lies and to survive bondage in the antebellum south, The Bondswoman’s Tale was a major contribution to the annals of American literature. And yet, it also posed a literary mystery that hit the headlines: Who was Hannah Crafts? Was she Black? White? How had she escaped? Was this book a fraud? What was her real story? 

Thanks to indomitable detective work married to incisive and generous literary analysis, Hecimovich has brought to life a story that simply couldn’t have existed without decades of determination, expert sleuthing, and some luck. As his book reveals, her true name was Hannah Bond, an enslaved Black woman from North Carolina who escaped disguised as a man and fled to a farm in upstate New York. While in hiding, she wrote A Bondswoman’s Tale, which, although a work of fiction, was filled with clues about who she was and what her own actual experiences had been.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo

First off, props to such a compelling title. The Crafts’ story is well known to scholars, but Woo’s fresh retelling of their tale is riveting. Step by step, she tracks how Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia whose union was not recognized by any court of law at that time, maneuvered one of the most audacious escapes imaginable. Light-skinned Ellen disguised herself as a genteel white man in poor health, traveling North for treatment with his dark-skinned slave—her husband, William, in disguise as her captive. Hiding in plain sight, the couple braved inquisitive hotel guests and pushy railway passengers. Ellen even put her arm in a sling to justify avoiding hotel desk registries—as she was illiterate and would have been found out when presented with a pen. 

Once north in New England, the Crafts’ troubles were not over: they had to evade recapture and make their way to Canada, and eventually, now facing international celebrity status, they found an uneasy sanctuary in England. The Crafts’ ambitions were often at odds with the aims of the Anti-Slavery organizations and white patrons they were surrounded by. And sometimes, their wishes were not in concert with those of their activist friends, such as fellow fugitive William Wells Brown, who sought to keep them in the public eye even when they were hoping to settle down more quietly. But the couple held onto each other, and in an astonishing twist rarely seen in such life stories, they boldly chose to return to Georgia some years after the Civil War. Woo lets their story unfold in their own words at times, drawing from their memoirs and interviews. But she also builds out their story in the broader context and conversations around fugitivity and freedom. Taut and tense, Master Slave Husband Wife is a story of flipping gender, race, and power politics upside-down in the pursuit of freedom fueled by love. 

Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

News flash: George Washington not only held people in bondage, but he and his wife were mad about it. They found managing enslaved people tiresome, although well worthwhile. Hence, it should have been no surprise to anyone that they bitterly complained about, chased, harassed, and did their best to terrorize Ona Judge, a brave and resourceful woman who walked out their door one day never to return. 

In this gem of a book from 2017, Erica Armstrong Dunbar traces how Ona Judge foiled the plans of the Washingtons, who used all their connections and political heft to recapture her. 

During that stretch of time when Philadelphia was the capital (1790—1800), the Washingtons lived there with eight enslaved people to wait on them. This was all very comfortable for the Washingtons, but local Pennsylvania laws meant that after six months, those slaves were supposed to be freed. After all, this wasn’t the slave state of nearby Virginia. The Washingtons tried to circumvent these laws by sending their enslaved servants in a regular rotation back to Virginia just before the six-month mark. Ona Judge, learning that she was due to be sent back to Mount Vernon, had other ideas. The ensuing hunt that Dunbar sketches out for us is suspenseful and undergirded by a deep terror—Judge’s very survival was at stake. At stake, too, as the author shows us, is our own willingness to reckon with the myths and truths of the founding fathers. Any romantic notions of George Washington will be shook.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

A sack? A book about a bag? What can we learn from looking at a particular object, in this case, a small cotton bag filled with tokens of love for 9-year-old Ashley, a child about to be sold away from her family? According to the embroidered message sewn onto the bag a generation later, the sack contained only a tattered dress, three “handfuls” of pecans, and a braid of Ashley’s mother’s hair. But it carried far more than that—it was, in the words of the mother, “To be filled with my love always.” With imaginative archival work that goes far beyond letters, documents, or even genealogy, Miles builds out a tender and loving world of mothers and daughters with these simplest of objects. 

Where other writers might be confounded or frozen when confronting the unknown, Miles admits that she is never able to precisely able to identify Ashley and her mother, but doesn’t let that stand in her way of seeking broader truths. Paperwork files aren’t the only place for stories. Examining every word in the embroidered message, Miles finds legacies of survival in textiles, in seeds, and in hair that connect traditions and longing. There is so much urgency in this work—it calls us to see things that have been discarded for what they are and what they can be.

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel

From the title of this winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, you’d think you’re going to read a powerful story about reparations of some sort. And for sure, that’s what it is. But be ready: it lands in places you won’t see coming. Henrietta Wood was born enslaved but in 1848, in Ohio, she was legally freed and thought her days of bondage were over. In 1853, after a few brief sweet years of freedom, though, she was kidnapped by a Sheriff named Zubulon Ward, dragged over the border into Kentucky, and sold back into bondage. She wasn’t free again until after the Civil War. This kind of tale could have been buried forever and no one would have remembered her particular tragedy. But Wood wasn’t going to let this injustice go by. She didn’t forget, and she didn’t forgive. With a sharp eye for detail and a rich historical framing that highlights the compassion and dignity of the remarkable woman at the core of the story, McDaniel tells how Wood went on to sue Ward for damages and won not only a moral victory but also a substantial financial one and one which was to set the stage and standard of restitution thereafter. That standard has rarely been upheld, but thanks to McDaniel’s resurrection of the story, we can see how reparations, no matter how meager meant something powerful to the survivors.

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder. 

Oooooh kay. As you can tell from the harrowing title, there is nothing subtle here. John Swanson Jacobs escaped enslavement in the American South. He was then determined to use his freedom to wage war against the avarice of the American system and its supporters—especially the 600,000 enslavers. But he wasn’t going to be dull about it! He would take everything down with a righteous fury that wouldn’t be mediated, filtered or softened by a white abolitionist editor, as was often the case for life writing by survivors of bondage. As he wrote: “My father taught me to hate slavery: but forgot to teach me how to conceal my hatred.”

In Jacob’s memoir, which is accompanied by a biography by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, who unearthed the original version from an 1855 newspaper, Jacobs decides to go for broke. His writing is wry, unforgiving, and full of fury. It’s hard to take your eyes off the page. While this is certainly the story of his life in captivity and his later escape, it chronicles, too, the racism and cruel disdain he often encountered in the North. He takes time out of his own riveting experiences (carrying pistols to use against “fleshmongers” or bounty hunters, for example) to rail against the hypocrisy of the founding political documents of the United States. To Jacobs, the American Constitution, which enshrined slavery, was “that devil in sheepskin.” 

Jacobs told his story from afar—from Australia, in fact—and perhaps that’s why he could be so brutally candid. Back when he was enslaved, he had accompanied his enslaver to the northern states. Rather than return south, Jacobs fled to stay North on his own, free terms. After a few years, he became a mariner. His voyages took him around the globe, and during a stint in Australia in the mid-1850s, he published his life experiences in a newspaper. A softer and much-truncated version of his memoir came out in book form a few years later. This full and uncensored version from the newspaper, though, newly brought to our attention in this edition by Schroeder, of what slavery was and what it meant to Jacobs was essentially lost on the other side of the globe until now.

Jacobs’ raging tale of survival and resilience would be wild enough. Yet the work has another stunning twist: John Swanson Jacobs was the brother of Harriet Jacobs, a woman who had herself escaped intolerable suffering at the hands of the Wheeler family with an almost incomprehensible strategy: she hid in an attic crawlspace for seven years. Yes. You read that correctly. Harriet, too, eventually escaped from enslavement and from that attic by making it North. She went on to write what is probably the most influential account of enslavement from a woman’s perspective, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 

John and Harriet were a powerful pair of siblings, with a shared gift for bold storytelling and uncompromising courage. How wild is it to see a story of bondage and freedom from both a brother and sister who vowed never to let their suffering be forgotten? Instead, with these astounding memoirs, they lay waste to a system that had tried to crush them. Teamwork.

The 1619 Project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones 

There’s so much to be said and has already been said about The 1619 Project that it’s hard to remember that beyond the drama and the conversations about banning it from schools or libraries, it is something to simply read and reckon with. Although originating as a special issue and multimedia project for the New York Times Magazine, designed to mark the first arrival of enslaved people to North America, the book compilation is stranger and provocative in its very structure—the breadth of its goals are more readily apparent in book form. The 1619 Project is a tremendous expansion of the original endeavor, but it isn’t just longer and broader in its considerations of topics, approaches and responses to some of the backlashes it has received. It’s more interesting than that. Controversies over the arguments put forth by the project have rarely looked at the art (written and visual) that the team offers up as a gloss to explicate the sometimes spotty history that was designed to occlude Black people from hindsight. 

Hannah-Jones and her team have created a new origin story for the country by showcasing factual history, to be sure, but this volume is richly framed with the work of poets and artists. Some of the facts of American history leave you speechless. It may only be the artists who can fill in the gaps of a history designed to silence and suppress.

The 17 essays are themselves consistent in arguing with dogged and punchy care about how slavery has been and continues to be at the core of what defines the United States. Indeed, some of the most powerful essays are often the ones you don’t see coming…there is Kevin Kruse on “Traffic,” for instance, or Anthea Butler on “Church,” wielding as much insight as the more predictably polemical essays such as that of Ibram X. Kendi on “Progress,” Jamelle Bouie on “Politics,” or Martha S. Jones on “Citizenship.” But this volume is worth checking out for more than just its formal conversations. Cognizant of the restraints of the essay form, the project includes the work of poets and fiction writers that intersperse each essay and reminds us that archival documents are a legacy of limitations. It takes Clint Smith, Claudia Rankine, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, Darryl Pinckney, and Jesmyn Ward, among many other artists, to respond to the archival truths in their most stark and human terms. 

After an essay on “Capitalism” by Matthew Desmond, an interspersed page in the middle of the book, for example, posts a paragraph about the 1816 attack by US troops on a British military site in Florida, Fort Mose, known as the “Negro Fort,” a stronghold of free Black people and fugitives from slavery. The attack, which led to the conquest of Florida, meant that the region could no longer be a destination for those heading South seeking freedom from bondage. These unlucky freedom seekers could be claimed, again, as property. The poem that immediately follows, however, Fort Mose by Tyehimba, Jess, walks us through this history anew and limns notions of property and capital that the essay can only gesture towards: “They fought only/ for America to let them be/ marooned-left alone-/in their own unchained,/singing,/worthy,/blood 

After an essay by Leslie and Michelle Alexander on “Fear” and an interspersed page noting that the famed free Black mathematician and scientist Benjamin Banneker wrote to Thomas Jefferson pointing out how the institution of slavery contradicted the fine points trumped in the Declaration of Independence, is a poem, “Other Persons” by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Betts incorporates the language of the constitution, particularly the 3/5ths clause that famously counted enslaved Black and native people as only 3/5ths of a white person in terms of apportioned political representation. As the poet rephrased it: “Slavery, another word for slavery, is a fraction.”

With creative responses to each essay and wry or poignant black-and-white photographs to launch each unit, The 1619 Project reminds us to reach further and with the courage to new kinds of documents and methodologies to find buried truths.

That’s not to say that the 17 essays aren’t profoundly grounded in accepted and vetted historical facts. They are. And it’s not to suggest that they aren’t accessible—they were shaped for a general readership and are kind and generous in how they reach out to readers to bring them along some difficult terrain. Nonetheless, by weaving art and scholarship, this compilation offers us new paths to reckon with truths and move forward in informed and impassioned power. As much as the historical work and public facing journalism lays it out for readers, the art within The 1619 Project suggests that it just might take our poets to model the tools we need to understand what has led us here and where we all have to go.

How to Be an Ethical Time Traveler

Posted on by Jo Lou

Time travel is hard to wrap your head around, especially when distracted by a total hottie from nearly 200 years ago. Movies like Groundhog Day, or even Palm Springs, try to smooth over the ethical questions of sleeping with a time traveler with movie magic; books like Time Traveler’s Wife do their best to ignore them entirely. The Ministry of Time however doesn’t back away from these questions, instead it plunges readers head first into the murky waters of consent, workplace romance, and hot time travelers.

 Commander Graham Gore was a real person who went on a real Arctic voyage, but this book is about a fictional Gore who gets scooped up by time-cops who bring him to our modern day and assign him a buddy aka “The Bridge”, our unnamed narrator. Spoilers ahead but the budding romance between these two gets thorny quickly, and the ethical questions at hand aren’t lost on our characters. Can a man like Gore satisfy a modern woman? Can our protagonist put her James Bond dreams aside enough to have a meaningful relationship with someone she’s assigned to protect? To make matters more complicated, we also have Arthur from 1916 and Margaret from 1665—one of which is also hot, and the other seems to be crushing on Gore! 

I reached out to author Kaliane Bradley to discuss the ethics of both time traveling and relationships in The Ministry of Time:

Bri Kane: How did you make that decision to have a real person be your time traveler?

Kaliane Bradley: So I suppose what happened is that I never intended for this to be a book, it was really just written to entertain some friends. I decided to start writing this because I got very into polar exploration and the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage. I became very fixated on this minor character Graham Gore, but because there’s so little information about this man, quite a lot of the character in the book is completely fictional. 

BK:One thing I thought was really interesting is it seems like you very purposely avoided a true love triangle. I wanted to talk to you about the main relationships and how you decided to balance who kisses and who doesn’t.

KB: So I suppose the central relationship was always between “The Bridge” and Graham Gore. As I was developing the story, I became very interested in the idea that these two are operatives for their respective governments and the ways that they have tried to conform to the idealized version of a British operative. Gore revealed that he’s had relationships with men but we don’t know to what extent they’ve been emotional or whether they were just situational. And “The Bridge” is clearly not aware of her attraction to Maggie. Because they are both so determined to be the correct kind of operative, they very much funnel all their desires into the straight relationship. By contrast, Margaret and Arthur have absolutely no interest in this kind of thing, they both want to experience joy and they want to thrive, they don’t just want to survive. 

BK: Yeah, they all have interests beyond just who are they going to start kissing, they have things that they want to explore that are not related to love. I was really interested in how you decided to include characters that a modern reader would label as bisexual, even though that’s not the language they used to explain those experiences. 

KB: Partly it was just spending so much time thinking about these men on the Franklin expedition. One of the things that repeatedly came up for me was the fact that I was very interested in what was functionally a British colonial project; so how to square being very deeply obsessed with something that I think is objectively bad. I wanted the reader to be seduced by the idea of the romance. I also just didn’t imagine anyone as straight, if you see what I mean. None of them came to me as straight people. 

BK: It’s really interesting that as you were developing these characters you never envisioned them as straight people—that makes a lot of sense to me. I wanted to ask you, if you think a man like Gore, who is about as old school as you can get, would be good at sex given our modern definitions of a good time? 

KB: I mean, I definitely wrote him as being good at it. I felt for Gore in particular what was important to me was that he retained a sense of curiosity; I wanted someone who explores. He’s curious, he’s willing to learn, he’s willing to be open. The way he approaches sex, I hope, is similar to the way that he approaches adapting to the 21st century: with curiosity, with empathy. That first sex scene is very much about his anxiety of connecting and getting it right and being a good officer, which he’s obsessed with. Even as their relationship develops, he’s very anxious about the level at which he’s connecting, and whether or not he’s connecting in a way that feels empathetic, romantic and fitting to her desires.

BK: So I need to ask you—if you were our protagonist, and you have this gorgeous Gore standing in front of you, do you think you would act on those feelings? 

Margaret and Arthur both want to experience joy and to thrive, they don’t just want to survive. 

KB: If it was me personally, I think I would have been much more suspicious about this project. The narrator obviously is a little bit suspicious, but she’s so interested in this idea of gaining control of a situation and the idea of the power structure, I would like to think I would be a little bit more suspicious of complying with power. When you comply with power structures, you are also giving up a certain amount of agency. It is kind of deranged of her actually to do this but she was so enjoyable to write because she is someone who you’re supposed to kind of recoil from but be seduced by. Seduced by the rom-com, the fish out of water, the burgeoning romance, and I quite liked the way that I pulled that off. Because she’s in a position where she is exploiting, she has power over him, she is the officer in charge—it is a slightly dubious decision. The fact that he is attracted to her and wants to be with her does not stop it from being a dubious decision.

BK: Yeah, there are thorns to navigate even if they choose to navigate them together. It’s interesting to hear you talk about this as a rom-com because it is in so many ways, but it is not in so many other ways. 

KB: I didn’t want them to end up together, because I thought that would slightly defy the point of the journey that the Bridge has gone on. And then at the time she is writing this text that is a kind of document to herself to saying, these are the mistakes you’ve made.. It turns out when they do end up together, they are both fucking miserable. The only way I could see that story ending is with them having to be apart and having to decide for themselves what they want to do next. 

BK: Now, that seems like the answer to my next question: What future can two people from different points in time even have together? There’s the happily ever after achievements: they got married, they had a kid, everything’s fine, right? 

KB: I like the idea that the term ‘rom-com’ is a sort of red herring. I like the idea that you’re seduced, as a reader, by the idea of the rom-com and that like “The Bridge” you don’t notice the kind of creeping darkness in the background.

BK: Absolutely. Okay, so once and for all: How can you ever truly have an ethical sexual relationship with a time traveler?

I like the idea that you’re seduced, as a reader, by the idea of the rom-com and you don’t notice the kind of creeping darkness in the background.

KB: That is an interesting question. When I  was developing this book into The Ministry of Time, the thing that I became very, very interested in was the parallel between these time travelers who are functionally refugees from history and the idea of refugees from other countries. So they’re all brought to 21st-century Britain, they can’t ever go home, they have to become good British citizens, they have to assimilate. I’m not sure I could say it’s impossible, because I also think it’s possible for someone who has come from a vulnerable situation, such as being a refugee, to have ethical, full, and joyous relationships with British citizens. If you’ve traveled through time or traveled across space, I don’t think that precludes the possibility of an equal, empathetic, mutually fulfilling relationship.

BK: So if you were given the opportunity to walk through this time travel machine, would you look for a lover on the other side?

KB: I guess it depends on what I’m doing walking through the machine, right? Because if you want to walk through and never come back, that’s your life now and I would like to imagine it would be a life that included friendship, romance, and challenges and all sorts of things. I mean, if I was just hopping back in time to find some fun… Tinder exists, but also I’m engaged!

My Transness Gets Less Obvious To Others Every Day

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Passing by Lane Michael Stanley

Los Angeles, California.

Him: Jess, elder millennial from Los Angeles.
Me: millennial, born in San Diego, raised in Maryland, three years on Testosterone. 

Jess takes me on our first date on Valentine’s Day, to a vegan Thai restaurant. We’ve been in love for a year and we can finally be together. He’s starting to come down with the flu but pretending he isn’t so we can hold hands and share soy chicken skewers with peanut sauce. 

We’ve only named our feelings as obstacles, our falling in love a problem in the context of his “open just for sex” marriage, an extremely common arrangement on the gay male hookup apps that generally works until it doesn’t. But now we have permission from his husband to love each other—permission that will soon be revoked—but we don’t know that yet and we’re far too happy now for any worry to feel real. 

I love Jess for his groundedness, his carefulness, the way he expands his comfort zone little by little instead of diving in deep like I’m prone to do. He’s lived his whole life as a gay man in the many versions of Los Angeles, the son of a construction worker in East LA, and now a studio executive. In this space, his space, it would never occur to him to worry.

He finds just the right time to stand, walk over to my side of the table, hold my face in his hands and whisper that he loves me. 

Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Him: Tom, young baby boomer from Tennessee, lived his whole life in the American South.
Me: lost in the blue of his eyes.

Krankie’s has the best vegan hot honey chicken biscuit I’ve ever had, so he’s promised to take me every day of my visit. A biscuit is a difficult task for vegan butter, but the flaky crust and spicy sweetness, washed down with deep chocolatey coffee on a cute patio with a new lover, is simply perfect. 

I interrupt our breakfast for a trip to the restroom. A peck on the cheek had never alarmed a man back when I was a girlfriend, but I’ve learned new scripts from gay men. Tom’s silver hair and classic Tennessee twang remind me that he grew up in a different time and place than me. As I leave the table, I kiss him on the cheek. His body tenses suddenly, his softness turned to stone by my touch.

I think maybe I’ve imagined it.

His body teaches me what he has learned over a lifetime.

Birmingham, Alabama.

Her: my mother, baby boomer, born and raised in southern California, now living in Maryland.
Me: traveling every weekend for the next seven weeks.

Jess is accompanying me to a film festival in Birmingham, the trans film I made with friends in Texas making rounds in the South I hadn’t expected. I call my mom during my commute and tell her about my upcoming trips. 

His body tenses suddenly, his softness turned to stone by my touch.

“Are you ever worried about traveling in places like that?” 

I tell her I feel safe traveling as trans now, because I have the privilege of passing. Passing always happens as something / to someone, but in the general milieu of crowds I have no issues. I slip past like any other guy, the other men in the restroom just assuming I’m taking a shit. But Jess accompanying me does make this trip feel a little different: the safety I feel as a passing trans person doesn’t extend to my intimate relationships with other men. 

“Be careful,” she says. “They don’t have to know you’re a couple.” 

Sometimes hiding is the only survival skill we know to teach each other.  

I tell her that the South has surprised me, that my trips with this little trans movie to North Carolina, Mississippi, and now Birmingham have brought me into community with other queer people at every festival, gays who are living resistance to a dominant red culture, communities of color and queers on the frontlines, and when we write off a region we leave them behind. In Birmingham we find a Black-owned vegan restaurant, a panel on climate justice, rainbow signs saying “All Are Welcome Here” at the gift shop we pop into for a souvenir. 

Still, when Jess decides to come with me, I rebook our Airbnb to a place where we won’t have to interact with the host. 

Maybe I’m being unfair to the woman we would have stayed with, whose only trait listed on her profile is “boy mom.” For all I know, she’s queer herself. 

And for all I know, she isn’t. 

Berkeley, California. 

Him: a disembodied hand.
Me: reasonably settled on the gay hookup apps, curious what offline might look like. 

I’ve been chatting with a guy whose profile name is CJ, but neither of us have a place to host so he suggests we meet at a bathhouse. He’s in San Mateo, which I get scoffed at more than once for referring to as the Bay Area, and I’m crashing on my friend’s floor in the Castro. I’ve never been to a bathhouse, and when I ask if it’s trans-friendly he admits he can’t really know the answer to that as a cis guy, but the Steamworks in Berkeley has a monthly all genders night. He sweetly calls ahead to make sure they will accept trans men any other day of the month. 

My glasses fog immediately inside, but even without them I can feel eyes on me as he gives me a tour, his Oklahoma upbringing clear in his graciousness toward me even in this hypersexual space. The blurry figures of passersby never come into enough focus for me to clock any facial expressions, leaving me to wonder whether anyone reacts to my transness. 

The apps might minimize each of us into a few explicit details, but their blessing is the power to make transness part of the billboard I project to any man who looks at me online. Disclosure politics don’t come into play when my screenname is “subbyftm” with a book emoji, and the app has a feature where I can filter for men who’ve indicated their interest in trans people on their profile. Real life has no such filter, and my transness is less obvious to others by the day. 

We pass men with soft towels wrapped around their waists, a row of open showers, a hot tub that sits below several screens showing hard-core pornography, and, for reasons of gay male culture that I’m just beginning to understand, a weightlifting area. 

There’s a long section of the bathhouse I can only describe as glory hole cubbies. I get in one and my new friend offers his thickness through the nicely cut-out opening in the cubby wall. A stranger’s hand gently swats at me through another opening, this space’s code for invitation. 

Real life has no such filter, and my transness is less obvious to others by the day.

Am I comfortable interacting sexually with a man who doesn’t know I’m trans? I feel a sense of unease, unclear on whether I’m uncomfortable in myself at not being known by a sexual partner, or worried about what someone would do after finding out they had interacted with a trans person unknowingly. (Maybe nothing; maybe something.)

I don’t know how I’m being perceived in this moment–which is an odd concern, because the entire purpose of a gloryhole is not to perceive each other, except as givers and receivers of sexual favors. Still, this space is explicitly for men, and my presence in here implies that I am a man, at least by my own definition and the definition of the guy at the front desk who took my entry fee, but I am the one who will have to deal with the consequences if this stranger has a different definition. 

In the moment, I decide that I don’t owe the potential recipient of a glory hole blowjob any disclosures, but it’s also not what I feel like doing when I’m already quite occupied with the cock I came here with. I ignore the hand and it politely goes away, the etiquette of the space exactly as my host described. 

In the steam room we listen to comically loud slurping sounds, until a burly daddy gets up from his knees and claps hands with whomever he was pleasuring in a manly show of camaraderie and approval. We fill the new silence chatting about the best hiking in San Francisco, our noses filled with eucalyptus and mint, the swiping hand forgotten. 

Somewhere in Arkansas.

Him: Jess, recently separated from his husband, still kind, open, rarely one to complain.
Me: Moving cross-country with cats, strung out from the process, a complainer. 

I’m leaving Los Angeles for a nine-month residency in New Jersey, and Jess is helping me move. My massive cat has shit himself in the backseat so we pull over at a gas station and try to clean him up next to the pumps. 

I am still new to the phenomenon of being two men in love outside the city of Los Angeles, and this place has been chosen only for its proximity to the patch of highway where the smell first reached our nostrils. 

Jess told me once he hasn’t experienced much homophobia. I don’t know anything about growing up in a Mexican family in Pacoima, and I don’t know anything about working at a studio full of people older, whiter, and straighter than me, but I wonder if quieter marks were left on him, even as he got to know every square foot of gay space in his sprawling hometown. He is sheltered in his own way: I wish I could learn this sense of ease from him, but I know it grew a long way from this pit stop, where a few pickup trucks idle around us in the twilight as cicadas sing in the surrounding woods.

Jess balls up a handful of stained paper towels after we declare my little beast dry enough, and kisses me before heading to throw them away.

It’s almost night and I don’t know who else is here at this gas station somewhere in the middle of Arkansas, and so my whole body tenses unconsciously, offering hardness in response.

Maybe he wonders if he imagined it. 

The mountains outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Him: Tom, sweet and tall and warm. 
Me: locating the part of my heart that can connect without sarcasm. 

I wish I could learn this sense of ease from him.

After the promised breakfast at Krankie’s he takes me on a driving tour of the fall colors. We talk quietly and cautiously about our dead lovers, my fiance who dropped dead of a heart attack seven years ago, and his partner of eight years who died in the ‘90s. I stop myself from asking if it was AIDS, envision the start of their love in late-eighties Tennessee, find out later his car slipped on black ice in the night, robbed him from everyone he loved. 

We stop every now and then to look out into valleys and take photos on our iPhones. I want a picture together. I like seeing photos of myself with emotionally intimate partners after a couple years of sticking to the gay hookup apps where I’m unlikely to learn their last names. 

At one vista a woman offers to take photos of us, and he stands several feet away from me. The photos are strange, the two of us with our hands in our pockets, smiling in front of the rolling mountains, what we are doing there together completely opaque from the photographs, a cross-generational male outing of some chaste and distant kind. 

This I know I haven’t imagined. 

Black Rock City, Nevada. 

Him: staring. 
Me: my first time at Burning Man, biking through dusty pathways. 

I assume being shirtless outs me, but it turns out most people can’t identify mastectomy scars. I make a little copper necklace at a tent and a man expresses shock that I am trans even as my scars sit freely on my chest. 

I pass so much now that people still easily call me “he” when I am completely nude, the revelation of my cunt just articulating the type of “he” they assume me to be. 

Only one time do I catch someone staring at my scars. I feel his eyes on me from across the path. I keep purposefully not catching his eye, feeling his fixation on me, not sure what he wants, debating whether I should just bike away and find my friends later. 

Finally I can’t help it and I look over at him. 

His top surgery scars poke out from underneath his vest. 

“Hey!” he calls to me. “You going to the transmasc meetup on Thursday?” 

Sequoia National Forest, California. 

Him: bright white farmer’s tan even in the nighttime. 
Me: driving into the rural vastness. 

Jess is assisting me on a shoot in Bakersfield so we can see each other while I’m in residence in Jersey. The hot spring is an hour out of town, but we wrap early and neither of us has ever been to a hot spring so we eat avocado rolls while driving to make it out before sunset. The subject of our tiny documentary shoot, a genderqueer dancer with bright pink hair and matching beard, said some people think night is the best time for hot springs anyway. They encouraged the nudist approach to the springs.

The winding road hugs a rushing river and Jess has never seen a river like this in real life. He’s from one of the biggest cities in the country but he’s traveled very little, our trek cross-country to Jersey doubling the number of states he’d set foot in. 

It’s the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, which we realize a bit too late as the springs are overcrowded. There are two “tubs,” one in its own little area and the other right on the riverside. Usually there are more, but everyone says water levels are high this year. 

We wait by the river, giving the family in the tub a bit of distance and privacy. When we see them getting out, another group is coming down with loud music blaring. We rush to get in, trusting the darkness to cover us as we fling off our shorts and hop into the warm, starlit water. 

We settle in, Jess’ arm around me, looking out over the river. 

They encouraged the nudist approach to the springs.

“Hey. Can I give y’all some advice?” 

We turn to find the father, a tattooed and heavily sunburned white man with thin brown hair down to his shoulders. 

“I see what you’re doing. I get it. And I support it. Every chance I get, I support you guys. But this isn’t cool. There’s kids here, man. You have to give some warning. Jumping in naked? Come on, man. I could be pissed off about it. And I am, a bit. It’s kind of a bad reflection on your community, don’t you think?” 

I freeze. Too aware of our nakedness, the clarity of the water. Jess deescalates. 

“That’s fair. We thought it was dark enough, but that’s fair.” 

“I mean, don’t you think it reflects poorly, on your whole thing? Like I said, I support you, man.” 

“Yeah. We understand.” 

Finally he leaves, satisfied that his advice has been heard.

We turn back to each other in his wake. I think he was mad about two men with their arms around each other. Jess thinks he was mad about the nudity. “Would he have come over to us if we were wearing swim trunks?” Jess asks. 

“Would he have come over to us if we were a straight couple jumping in naked?” 

We have no way of answering these questions. 

Sitting in this river, naked with my love, deep in the woods of a red part of California, it’s hard for me to feel safe. 

Music blares from the group behind us, battling the sounds of the rushing river. 

We sit, and try to breathe, and try to attune. 

Los Angeles, California. 

Him: Gen X gym rat.
Me: moving soon to New Jersey, proving you can still cry all the time on Testosterone. 

I want the muscle bear I’ve been fucking for over a year without learning his job, last name, or interests (other than going to the gym) to aggressively pound me one more time before I move to Jersey, but neither of us can host. I call the local bathhouse to see if the space that is safe for his overt sexuality will let me through the door.

“This is a men’s club.” 

“Right, so I live as male, everyone assumes I’m a man, but my driver’s license says female, so I’m just checking that won’t be an issue.” 

“Hold, please.” 

I had thought my Berkeley-Oklahoma boy was just being cautious.

A new, more hostile voice answers the phone. 

“This is a men’s club.”

I explain again.

“It needs to say male on your driver’s license.” 

“So, just so you know, that’s a pretty problematic policy for trans people – “

“Get your license changed, you can come in.” 

“Getting your license changed is a difficult process, what’s the harm in – “

“We can’t let women in.” 

“I’m not a woman.” 

“We have to define it somehow. How would you define it?” 

We argue and I fall back on how I look like a man, how everyone I meet sees me as a man – which is truly, deeply, not how I would define it, but it’s the argument I find when I’m unexpectedly cornered.

My interlocutor is getting more upset, more angry at me, and so eventually I hang up the phone mid-sentence.

The muscle bear fucks me in the back alley of the leather bar by my house, even though it’s early evening so we’re too visible for his comfort. We have onlookers and one of them finds me on the apps the next day, says we put on a good show. I send him back a kissy face emoji.

Atlanta, Georgia.

Her: TSA agent who clearly doesn’t enjoy her 4am shift.
Me: used to this shit, hoping to catch up quickly to Jess.

She looks skeptically at my ID, back at me, back at my ID. 

The muscle bear fucks me in the back alley of the leather bar by my house.

“Do you have another form of ID?”

I say no, and she goes to find her supervisor. 

I often find myself wishing for a code, and airports in the South are the closest I’ve gotten to one. While I’ve sailed without issue through the airports of Austin, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Burbank, Minneapolis, LaGuardia, and San Francisco with my supposedly-contradictory beard and the little F on my license, I’ve been stopped twice in Charlotte, and now for a second time in Atlanta.

Our experiences traveling in the actual city of Atlanta have been joyous, loud, and queer. Our first trip was for a queer film festival with an afterparty at the Eagle, a sea of naked leathermen unleashed behind the strip mall facade. Our second trip was to support one of Jess’ other partners as he grieved the loss of his adoptive queer mom, her memorial filled with two hundred queers whose lives she’d uplifted and touched. Yesterday we walked through Grant Park hand in hand and received the hand signal for “love” from a mom with a stroller, and a “good morning, fellas” from a couple of guys I hadn’t clocked as gay until that last word left their lips. 

But this morning we’re not in the joyful queer parts of the city of Atlanta: we’re at the end of the hour-long security line, and the agent is telling me to step aside and wait for her supervisor to come inspect my license, and I’m left to stand there and wonder why I’m being escalated to a supervisor at this airport for a second time in three months. She gives me a halfhearted instruction to wait, but hangs onto my ID. 

“I’m transgender,” I tell the agent, hoping this will speed up her process.

“Yeah, I figured, I just didn’t want to…” She trails off. It feels like she wanted to say “embarrass you.” She tells me the issue is that I don’t look like my photo, but this photo has satisfied plenty of agents before her. It was taken eighteen months into starting T, and my round face and button nose are exactly the same as they always have been. Somehow I think the issue is less about the photo, and more about her perceived discrepancy between my beard and that pesky little F.

Jess hovers near me as I wait by her station. The agent sees him and rolls her eyes. “I didn’t tell you to stand there,” she says to him. “Go on through.” He just points at me and she leaves us alone. 

My gratitude for Jess’ quiet presence is more than I can say.

Her supervisor finally arrives. The last time an agent called over her supervisor (which was also at the Atlanta airport), he just told her that was me and I went right through. I hope that this man will bring the end of this ordeal and I can get started taking my large electronics out of my bag, but instead he pulls me out of line. 

“Do you have any other form of ID?” he asks again, my license still in his hand. I say no again. 

I ask him, “Do cis men who grow beards have to change their license photo?”

“I do, yeah,” he responds, and flashes me his beardless ID badge despite his long (and impressive) patch of silver. I don’t think he understands my question: he looks more different from his photo than I do.

My mind races to the potential of my missed flight, the minutes ticking down to boarding, as he asks me for the third time whether I have any other form of ID. He finally believes me that I don’t. He says he can take me through personally with an extra layer of screening, which apparently means agents will individually search all my items after they go through the scanner.

Jess and I watch, constantly checking the time to our flight, as an agent carefully wipes everything in my bag with a tiny cloth to check for residue of explosives: the lining of my shoes, the little stuffed rainbow chicken we bought from a local queer vendor, my tarot cards, my travel vibrator. I wonder how the presence of a beard and a little F have warranted this level of threat detection. 

I wonder how the presence of a beard and a little F have warranted this level of threat detection.

I carry with me a months’ supply of Testosterone. Jess is helping me navigate my healthcare while I’m on my residency in New Jersey, and he’s handed it off to me in this city between our cheap-airline-sized personal items. The agent wipes it with her tiny cloth, almost puts it back in my bag, and then pauses to check with her supervisor. My heart races, imagining that not only could I miss my flight, but I could lose access to the thing that has somehow, for reasons I don’t quite understand, made my body a place I can call home.

This supervisor gives her an easy thumbs up and my heartbeat settles. 

Jess and I make it to the gate, and he sees me off as I head back to Jersey and he returns to Los Angeles. Tears hit my cheeks as I turn away from him, standing behind me, seeing me off. 

Brooklyn, New York. 

Him: Jess, making friends with the space right outside his comfort zone. 
Me: comfortable, exhilarated. 

Jess is singularly great at finding events, vegan restaurants, secret dives and famed attractions. He finds a transmasc sex party at a dungeon in New York City two weeks after I move to Jersey. The event description proclaims it as a party celebrating trans men in a historically gay male space. 

I love public nudity and I love group sex. 

In the past, my only barrier to full enjoyment of these things has been wondering about perceptions of my transness: whether people know, whether people care, whether I care whether they care, whether they will force me to care. 

Here I am free of those concerns. 

This party is half cis men, half mascs with their tits bursting through leather suspenders, fat hairy men with spread-open pussies, T4T foursomes and me in my red lace panties. 

Jess pushes himself by wearing nothing but his jockstrap, exudes a confidence that he doesn’t quite feel yet from his gorgeous, soft body. 

This is a space for exactly, precisely, us. 

We fuck, and go back to our hotel, and fuck more. 

We wake up and explore Brooklyn, hand in hand. 

We fall a little more in love. 

Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 

Him: Tom, letting us back into his meticulously designed apartment. 
Me: full of delicious pizza, wondering if North Carolina is perhaps a secret vegan haven. 

We return from the mountains to his apartment and fall into each other’s arms, enjoying easy intimacy, kissing and cuddling and rarely separating our hands. 

We had found one empty vista where we took a selfie with his arm around me in front of the plunging valley. 

Now his body can relax again, now that we are safely in the quiet of his home. 

His queerness can often be named, but it’s better expressed in privacy. 

A night of softness connects us again, reprieves us from the world outside. 

Sequoia National Forest, California. 

Him: Jess says he could stay in this hot spring forever.
Me: starting to be unhinged by the blaring music, still rattled from the sunburnt father.

We get out of the warm tub, choosing to admire the stars from dry but quiet land. 

As we pass by the other spring we realize the people in it are about to get out. They leave. The group with the music follows shortly after. 

It’s just me and Jess, a hike down the hill from the parking lot, the sounds of the river our only soundtrack, and the warm silty water beckoning us. 

Still my body worries that someone will show up, that they could hurt us in this isolated and wild place and no one would ever know to find them. 

I don’t know if that worry is real. But it lives in my body, criss-crossed in the space below my ribs, twitching just behind my ear. 

I wish sometimes that my safety was mathematical. I wish a receipt of how a stranger was perceiving me, plus knowledge of my region, plus proximity of a gay male lover could equal a clear guideline for behavior that would keep me safe. I can’t eliminate risk, and I can’t even calculate it, but I know the cost of missing moments with my love because I am afraid.

Jess and I strip our clothes and slide into the warmth of the spring. His arms wrap around me and the dust in the water settles between our bodies. 

I wish sometimes that my safety was mathematical.

We look up at the firmament of stars, the most stars I’ve ever seen, filling every inch of the sky, this vast sphere holding us. 

I breathe into him, and I release what I can’t know, and I let him hold me beneath the blanket of the universe. There are no footsteps so for now, at least for now, there is no reason to worry. 

I melt into him, and we melt into the springs, and we become creatures of the forest, and the stars shine down on us. 

And that is all there is.

7 Books by Brazilian and Brazilian American Writers You Should Be Reading

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Brazil has never lacked great literature. But for a long time, it seemed that only the classic Brazilian writers were being published and read in English. You may have heard their names: Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Mário de Andrade, Hilda Hist. These are all phenomenal writers, but the vast majority of Brazilian writers, alive and at work today in Brazil and abroad, have not had their books translated into English, and until as recently as the last few years, they hadn’t been shortlisted for or won any major literary awards outside of the Lusophone sphere. 

Luckily, that’s changing. Thanks mostly to the relentless advocacy of BIPOC writers and translators over the last decade, Brazilian literature has finally (albeit slowly) started to achieve new heights, with recent books by Brazilian writers winning the National Book Award, being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and making several prestigious “best-of” lists, a recognition that is long overdue. What’s also exciting is seeing books by contemporary Black Brazilian writers, queer Brazilian writers, and writers from parts of Brazil that are not as regularly represented even inside Brazil, making the headlines. Here are seven books showcasing the richness of contemporary Brazilian literature.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

Starting with the most formally unusual of the seven books on this list. Ananda Lima’s aptly titled debut collection Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a masterclass in, well, craft; a work of fiction that engages deeply and seriously with literature, film, photography, politics, life and death, all the while not taking itself too seriously. On the contrary: it’s a book that seems to laugh at itself, happy to follow its own dreamy logic. Threading between different countries and worlds, an immigrant writer, inspired by her one-time lover, the Devil, sets out to write an account of her life in the United States. In nine linked stories, she illuminates the mundane aspects of reality–New York City rats, dying plants, subway rides, dirt, workshop critique–as well as the profound, like the threat of deportation, a deadly virus, and the emotional distance from family superimposed upon the geographical one. From its unexpected structure to the philosophical questions it raises, from language that sparkles to settings, even the metaphysical ones (especially the metaphysical ones) that are textured and scented, to characters so flawed and human they expand our perception of humanity, there’s so much joy in Craft.

Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato

For its small size, this stunning literary debut packs a punch. In a little under 130 pages, we follow a young Brazilian college student in Vermont as she builds a new life abroad, and the attempts, mostly mediated by screens, she and her mother make to keep their strong bond unblemished despite their physical distance. Dantas Lobato’s ingenuity resides in crafting a story that at first seems quiet and slow through her meticulous use of white space, uninterested in adhering to conventional plot expectations, but that under the surface commits instead to an accumulation of movement and feeling that feels far truer to this fragmented mother-and-daughter relationship than any grandiose narrative could. Over hours-long Skype calls, mother and daughter share the shape of their lives on opposite sides of the American Hemisphere: the change of seasons, what they ate for dinner, the dramatic plot of Brazilian soap operas, what clothes to bring on an international trip. The result is a tapestry of distance and intimacy, with all the closeness and discomfort that such a relationship entails. This is the immigrant novel at its tenderest. Dantas Lobato, lauded literary translator and a 2023 National Book Award winner, is working on her own translation of Blue Light Hour to Portuguese, something Lusophone readers can look forward to.

The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

How many times have we heard the story, which makes it all the more infuriating: a Black man is cruelly murdered at the hands of the police? But we haven’t always read the story this way, certainly not in contemporary Brazilian literature. In blocks of raw and moving prose by Jeferson Tenório, in a translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato that renders the text intimate and ebullient, we follow Pedro, a young architecture student, on his quest to reimagine the life of his dead father Henrique in the aftermath of his brutal killing in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is an honest, unromanticized account of a beloved and complicated character and his struggles in his personal relationships, his difficulty to reach his public school students and to connect with his son, even his failed attempts to read Dostoyevsky on the bus or wear a black jacket in public, all of which trace back to the racism that pervades every aspect of Black life in Brazil. One of my favorite aspects of this novel is Pedro’s decision not to flinch away from his father’s shortcomings: through’s Pedro’s eulogy, Henrique is able to transcend his status of faceless victim to that of an agent of his own life, tragically cut short, but beautiful and full of music to the last heartbeat. The translator’s note, where Dantas Lobato discusses some of her aesthetic and semantic choices behind her translation, is also an accomplishment.

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Jr., translated by Johnny Lorenz 

This acclaimed novel is the winner of the Jabuti Award, the Oceanus Prize for best international novel, and a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize (a first for a Brazilian novelist). Set in the remote Bahia countryside, one of the poorest parts of the Brazilian Northeast, Crooked Plow follows sisters Bibiana and Belonísia after the childhood accident that changes their lives for good, forcing them to a bond that is both corporeal and mythical. Using the sisters’ brutal encounter with their grandmother’s knife as a symbol for the silence and violence that will echo throughout the story, Vieira chronicles the trials and indignities of the community of impoverished farmers the sisters were born into, the majority the descendants of slaves who spend their lives working the land, but have no legal rights to own it. With sharp penmanship and backed by decades of scrupulous research, and in a precise and self-assured translation by Lorenz, Vieira documents the farmers’ plight at the hands of white landowners who abuse, deny, and dispose of them as they see fit, and the perilous consequences for those who try to change their procurement. I so admired this novel’s interest in both magical and social realism, its poetic cadence which has the pull of a trance, and how even the novel’s structure is rich with religious imagery, incorporating stories and characters from the African Diaspora mysticism. 

The Head of the Saint by Socorro Acioli, translated by Daniel Hahn

This novel’s synopsis piqued Gabriel García Márquez’ interest so much that he invited Acioli to join his writing workshop in Cuba in 2006, where she wrote the initial seeds of what would eventually grow to be one of the most immersive works of magical realism to be published in Brazil. A young man, down on his luck and on a mission to honor his dead mother’s final wishes, starts living inside the giant hollow head of a saint in a run-down town in the Northeast of Brazil. Right away, he realizes he’s able to hear the townswomen’s prayers when inside the saint’s head, and after scheming with another young man and eventually helping some of these women sort out their love lives, his situation and that of the town transform drastically. These pages are immersed in such an interesting version of Brazil, swept in religiosity and folklore, with peculiar landscape and fauna, rich in vivid imagery and symbolism, and a refreshing regional vernacular that elevates the reading experience. The author of more than twenty books, this is Acioli’s only translation to English so far, but here’s hoping her second novel, which came out in 2023, reaches Anglophone readers soon.

Wait by Gabriela Burnham

Burnham’s second novel, set on Nantucket Island, tells the story of sisters Elise and Sophie over the course of an arduous summer. A few weeks after Elise’s college graduation, she learns that her mother, an undocumented Brazilian immigrant, has been deported to Brazil. With no other family to turn to, Elise and Sophie must support themselves in a corner of the United States where prices are high and resources for the poor and undocumented are few. They are helped by Elise’s affluent college friend, whose support, benign as it might be, also comes with a cost. Down in Brazil, Elise’s mother is eager to be reunited with her daughters and must reckon with a country that no longer feels like home. Written with crystalline prose and from a place of deep empathy, Wait upends common conceptions of Nantucket as an exclusive, wealthy enclave, and reveals that, even on a charming island thirty miles out to sea, working class people must push up against the unjust forces of inequality and discrimination.

The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

Brazilian writer Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award in translated literature for this debut novel, the first time a Brazilian author has reached such heights. Raimundo is a 71-year-old illiterate gay man whose queerness was violently suppressed by his parents when he was young, and he decides to sign up for literacy classes late in life so he can finally read the letter his lover, Cícero, had sent him fifty years before. As Raimundo’s grasp on the words increase, memories pour out of him: his moments with Cícero, his years spent doing manual labor and having hidden sexual encounters with men, his own fits of brutality and rage, powered by his decades-long internalized homophobia, and his friend’s suggestion that he learns how to read, which brings about a personal revolution. With vigorous prose and a fragmented, nonlinear narrative, The Words that Remain is a tender book that touches upon themes of closeness and courage, violence and redemption, a heartbreaking novel about queer love and survival.

15 Indie Press Books You Should be Reading This Summer

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

This summer, find comfort in the power of chosen family and friendship, laugh at the absurdities of the patriarchy, and weep at a story of heartbreak and redemption. Themes often present in literature—and in life—like the search for belonging and reconciliation, the fight against oppression, healing from trauma, and grieving the past and lost loves are everywhere this season. 

Here are 15 small press books for your summer reading list:

Tin House: Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy

In this story centered on the split of Hispaniola that divided Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two friends are cleaved and torn apart. Sisi and Gertie have a special closeness as girls, until a formerly obscured family connection takes them away from each other. A  political upheaval ripples through the Haitian government under the dictatorship of Francois Duvalier, forcing them to leave their homes. Sisi flees to France, and Gertie is married off to a man from a wealthy Dominican family. Yet, despite their class differences and different paths, they reconnect in the US. This is a story of two girls who become women and must address a turbulent past that neither chose, but both have agency in reconciling. In Village Weavers, there are formidable political actors and influential families, but nothing is as strong as the bond of a best friend. 

Dzanc Books: The Sentence by Matthew Baker

In this dystopian novel world which runs parallel to the contemporary United States, Riley—a grammar professor—is noticed by the new military regime, unfortunately for him. Riley flees. As an academic and word-nerd, Riley is not, on the surface, suited to living in the forest among sympathizing anarchists; but in this space, Riley finds community. The Sentence is both a reference to Riley’s presumed death sentence under the regime, and to the structure of Baker’s novel: it is single sentence, diagramed, with offshoots to tell of paths taken and those not, fears realized, bullets dodged. Billed as a graphic novel, The Sentence is more a work of linguistic precision with a visual element. Baker goes beyond an exercise in experimentation to deliver an impactful narrative that successfully pushes the limits of form.

Clash Books: How to Get Along Without Me by Kate Axelrod

A woman takes up a flirtation with a dermatologist treating her for genital warts; women scan and swipe the dating aps looking for sex or relationships, but also because it’s part of the zeitgeist; roommates find they have more emotional intimacy with one another than would ever be possible with their dates. How to Get Along Without Me is a thoroughly modern post-Obama-era, post-pandemic collection of loosely linked short-stories that does not just cut open the souls of millennials living in the 2020s, but rather filets it for display as if for an Instagram story. Axelrod captures what it is like to live in New York City,  working jobs in public service and publishing, dating people who don’t want to commit, and reckoning with mortality of family. An absorbing and engaging collection that’s unmissable. 

Press 53: The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson

A mother and her son are afflicted by lycanthropy from which he recovers but she does not, a daughter gives her dementia-stricken mother a therapy doll that is eventually dismembered, and a sister stages a desperate intervention with her brother while trying to manage her career in deceased pet portraiture. In this collection, Shannon Robinson juxtaposes the mundane with the fantastical, the heartfelt with the heartbreaking, and ties the dozen stories together with a deep sense of longing. Most of the people in her stories are actually trying to be better friends, siblings, coworkers, spouses; and many of these same people are experts at failing. Robinson writes with such stunning emotional clarity and attention to our inner lives that her stories, even in harsh situations, take on a tender quality. 

Forest Avenue Press: The Queen of Steeplechase Park by David Ciminello

The Queen of Steeplechase follows Bella as she comes of age in an Italian-American household with an overbearing father who abuses his authority and a mother bed-ridden with depression. When Bella becomes pregnant at 15, her baby is taken by nuns and she sets off on a journey to find her son. This raucous tale takes readers to Coney Island for a strip-tease and into the homes of Depression-era wiseguys. The characters are outcasts who have been judged and deemed unworthy by society. But Bella refuses to be cast aside, instead she finds her chosen family—and at every turn, she cooks with a spiritual dedication. Yet, she finally has to face a conundrum that not even her famous meatballs can fix. The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a novel that puts its faith in people believing in themselves, and the result is a joyful read.

Anti-Oedipus Press: Nervosities by John Madera

A young woman who can’t swim is tossed into a lake during a girl’s trip, a teacher is beat down and has to teach “The So-So Gatsby” yet again, and a woman finds an origami lily in her mailbox as she grieves her husband so deeply that his name is only blank space on paper—he is so gone, he has not even a name. While Madera’s prose has a technical quality to it in the sense that each sentence feels highly considered, it is not at the expense of evocative feelings and rich characterization. Nervosities explores the boundaries of the short story in a way that nods to intellectualism but cares more about the heart. Unique and surprising. 

BOA Editions: Exile in Guyville by Amy Lee Lillard

In this collection of stories eponymous with the 1993 album from Liz Phair, middle-aged women form a Riot Grrrl cult worshiping punk feminism and Sirens of the Greek mythology, a living display of women from different points in history are on exhibit at a museum, and an app that comes with an implant and purports to help people live their best lives is actually a coercive force for toxic beauty standards. Lillard harnesses female rage, technological anxiety, and fears about dystopian futures to deliver a breathtaking book where characters reclaim their power, reject algorithms, and run towards freedom. 

Catapult Books: Accordion Eulogies by Noé Álvarez

Part family story and part music history, the thread that runs through this memoir is Álvarez’s unwavering interest in how place impacts us. Whether the places we live, the places we left, the places we come from, and the places we might visit or places that might hold a key to unlock a door to yet another place; his exploration of how geography is more than lines on a map is potent and gripping. Through meeting with accordion makers, players, and traveling with and learning an accordion of his own, he gets closer to his own origin story, which includes an accordion-playing grandfather with a mysterious past. Álvarez seems to write with no agenda other than understanding. This memoir emerges as a thoughtful and empathetic answer to questions about where we come from—and how it’s shaped us.

SFWP: Splice of Life by Charles Jensen

Charles Jensen braids essays intersecting his experiences growing up gay with intelligent analysis of iconic movies. Splice of Life examines how popular culture becomes deeply imbued in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s. Here, the movie Mean Girls intersects with the British feminist film critic Laura Mulvey, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure collides with Fatal Attraction. Midwestern Jensen becomes the unlikely prom king, and goes off to college—and has his own on-screen experiences, in a commercial and for Jeopardy. Yet, at its core, Splice of Life, is not about film nor public intellectuals: it is the story of Jensen becoming a man.

West Virginia University Press: How to Make Your Mother Cry by Sejal Shah

In this collection, young women search for connection at bars and with their roommates, a Gujarati adolescent in America cannot forgive her mother for an embarrassing linguistic mix up, a girl writes love letters to her 7th grade teacher, and a child drinks only orange juice until her body is razor thin. How to Make Your Mother Cry is a study in growing up. Trying to make it in New York, or just trying to make it through the day, Shah’s characters negotiate the diaspora and immigrant parents, but the center of the book is the feeling of longing. There is an auto-fiction element and more than a nod to feminist texts, but ultimately these stories shine brightly and stand on their own—just as the heroines of each story are trying to do. 

Seven Stories Press: Breaking the Curse by Alex DiFrancesco

In this memoir about trauma and reckoning, Alex DiFrancesco uses tarot, Italian witchcraft, Catholic saints, Buddhism, and sobriety to free themselves from a cycle of self-destructive behavior that is the result of complex PTSD, sexual assault, and constant exposure to transphobia. As much as readers ache for DiFrancesco in the depth of addiction or in scary situations, there is a clear transformation taking place in the book. The reader is called to witness DiFrancesco’s very public confrontation and legal battle against a man who raped them—but the book transcends this act of violence. Breaking the Curse is ultimately a story of healing, and it is both a gift and a guide to anyone searching to reclaim their own power. 

WTAW Press: Life Span by Molly Giles

This flash memoir is a retrospective on the author’s life, beginning in 1945 when she was three and proceeding through 2023 when she is nearing eighty, and the sections begin to zoom through months, which feels similar to how the past often seems to unfold slowly and the present whizzes by. With acerbic wit, Giles keenly captures the absurdity of our expectations of one another, of the patterns we repeat—three of her very serious relationships are with spendthrifts, for example—and the paths we choose to travel over and over again. In Giles’ case, that road is the Golden Gate Bridge, as she crosses the San Francisco Bay and the country. Writers will find her descriptions of floundering in manuscript pages relatable, but Giles offers a stubborn charm to any reader of thoughtful essays. 

Tin House: Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Charles Lamosway has been carrying a secret for over two decades: he, a white man, is the biological father of Elizabeth, a Penobscot Reservation member. Her home, just across the river, is visible from his porch. Charles himself was raised on the Reservation side of the river by his white mother and his Native stepfather. Now, with his mother slipping into dementia and his stepfather lost in a tragic hunting accident, he longs to tell Elizabeth the truth about her origins. More than anything, he is trying to hold on to what is left of his family, and the split between on- and off- reservation is like two halves of Charles’ broken heart. Fire Exit is a tender and riveting novel of what it means to belong. 

Dzanc Books: Zan by Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh

An young Iranian student in America must decide if coming out as a lesbian to her father is worth it; a teen finds a connection to her grandmother who was a decorated swimmer before the post-revolutionary restrictions banned women from nearly all aspects of public life; two American sisters visit Tehran and laugh at their interactions with the morality police while their mother is wrecked with fear. These stories, set in Iran and the United States, are a tribute to women defiantly fighting against the patriarchy and gendered oppression. Zan explores the nuance of the cultural divide as Iranian immigrants or the children of immigrants lose (or never quite learn) Farsi; and, while many of the stories are specific to the overthrow of the Shah and installment of Ayatollah Komeni in 1979, all are still resonant to today’s society.

Restless Books: Between This World and The Next by Praveen Herat

Joseph was a war-time journalist with an adventurous life that earned him the moniker of “Fearless.” Yet, for all of his accolades, his personal life is in turmoil: his mother is in the grips of dementia, and his pregnant wife died in an accident. In search of closure and healing, he travels to Cambodia, the country where his father was murdered. There, through a connection with an old friend, he encounters Song, a woman who has her own gut-wrenching circumstances. Things turn dangerous quickly, and Joseph begins to understand how much distance the camera lens had put between him and the reality of tragic events, and the novel finds him swept into a world of sex trafficking, arms dealers, and globe-trotting criminals. Between This World and The Next is a page-turning literary thriller that you won’t be able to put down.